History > 2006 > UK > International (I)

Peter Brookes

The Times

August 2, 2006

British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A Plea For Mercy:

Campaigners rail at Musharraf

as Briton faces execution tomorrow

A British man, twice cleared of murder, is tomorrow due to be executed in Pakistan under ancient religious law.
As time runs out, his family is fighting to the last for justice - and to save his life

Published: 30 September 2006
The Independent
By Ian Herbert and Justin Huggler
 

He was, in the words of one of the judges who ruled on his case, the victim of a "shameless" set-up by police who fabricated evidence to secure his conviction after a criminal trial had absolved him of guilt. Yet at dawn tomorrow the British national Mirza Tahir Hussain will face death by hanging for a crime of which he almost certainly innocent.

The family of Hussain, who was arrested 18 years ago for the murder of a taxi driver in Pakistan, made a final plea for his life yesterday to the country's visiting President, Pervez Musharraf, as he arrived to address the Oxford Unionon the subject on "modern-day Pakistan".

General Musharraf, who has been besieged with reminders and protests about the case during his tour of Europe in the past 10 days, faced a vocal protest by Hussain's family. As his car pulled away from the university, he clearly acknowledged the protest and gave a thumbs-up signal when a protester shouted: "Will you free Mirza Tahir?"

But Amnesty International, which took part in the family's protest, provided a grave assessment of Hussain's chances. "Pakistan has a very high execution rate, and decisions are arbitrary," said the organisation's Sarah Greene. "This case remains on a knife edge."

The case reflects international concern about the human rights record in Pakistan, where some 7,000 people are on death row and, according to a recent Amnesty report, "torture and ill-treatment are endemic; arbitrary and unlawful arrest and detention are a growing problem; extrajudicial executions of criminal suspects are frequent."

In Oxford yesterday, General Musharraf preferred to talk about the country's blossoming economy, free media and desire to tackle terror. Pakistan, he told the Union, needed "understanding and assistance instead of criticism" in its efforts to tackle terror.

Hussain's brother Amjad, 38, who grew up with him in Leeds, West Yorkshire, has given up his job at a drugs research company to fight for his brother's release. He called on General Musharraf to demonstrate that he was "a progressive and modern" leader. "The whole world is watching this. I'm sure he will not let us down," he said.

General Musharraf, who was lobbied on the subject again last night in a meeting with Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, leader of the Muslim Parliament of Britain, has told European politicians that he does not have the authority to overrule the sharia court which ruled on the case - though a senior legal officer in Pakistan told ITN this week that the President was within his constitutional rights to save the Briton's life.

Mirza Tahir Hussain was a typical sports-obsessed 18-year-old when he left Leeds in December 1988 to visit relatives in Pakistan. It was his first trip alone, a break from his A-level studies, after which he planned to follow a career in the British Army. He had been a keen member of the Territorial Army since leaving school.

Three days after flying out from Heathrow, he took a train from his aunt's home in Karachi to Rawalpindi where he hailed a taxi to reach his family in the village of Bhubar. It was a trip few Pakistanis would risk with an unknown driver in the dark, but Hussain paid 500 rupees for the ride.

Later that night, Hussain led police to the body of the driver, who had been shot dead. He has always maintained that the driver stopped the car, tried to sexually assault him and pulled a gun. In the ensuing struggle, the gun went off and killed the driver. It was subsequently established that the gun did belong to the driver.

Hussain, who was brought to Britain as a baby by his parents, was convicted and sentenced to death. The High Court in Lahore found flaws in the case and ordered a retrial, in which Hussain was sentenced to life imprisonment. Again, the High Court overturned the verdict, and on 20 May 1996, he was acquitted of all charges and looked set to be freed. But Pakistan's sharia court, which operates in parallel to the secular court and its English common law, intervened and reimposed the death sentence.

Murder does not usually fall within the jurisdiction of sharia courts, but the court argued that this was a case of armed robbery, a crime which does. Under sharia law, death sentences for murder can be commuted if the victim's family accepts "blood money" and asks the courts to show mercy. Throughout Hussain's case the family of Jamshed Khan has refused any offers of blood money and has criticised previous stays of execution.

A 59-page ruling from one of the judges sitting in the sharia court stated that the young Briton had been framed by the Pakistani police, who planted evidence on him, introduced false witnesses in court, and lied on the witness stand. Mr Justice Abdul Wahid Siddiqui - the dissenting voice when the judges found Hussain guilty 2-1 - accused police of fabricating evidence at a time "when all negotiations had failed" - a clear reference to attempts by the police to elicit bribes. Hussain was "an innocent raw youth, not knowing the mischief and filth in which the police of this country is engrossed," the judge wrote .

Amjad Hussain has been told by a former law minister, Khalid Ranjha, that the President has the power to revoke the sharia ruling. "There is an individual's life at stake here," he said. "Mirza has lost the prime of his youth for a crime he has been cleared of."

UK citizens on death row

** Linda Carty, a UK national from St Kitts, was sentenced in Texas for murdering a neighbour to kidnap her child. She has twice appealed.

* Chan King Yu, a British national from Hong Kong, was charged with trafficking drugs in Malaysia in 2000. He was sentenced to hang after losing an appeal. He has one more appeal.

* Anthony Flanagan, 35, from Leicester, was sentenced to death in Thailand in 2004 after being found guilty of possessing heroin with intent to sell.

* Kenny Gay, 51, has been on death row in California for 21 years, after he and a co-defendant were convicted of murdering a police officer.

* Neil Revill, 34, was charged with the 2001 murder of a couple in their apartment.

* Kenny Richey, 41, was convicted in 1987 of murdering a child in the US, in a fire that prosecutors claimed he started to kill his ex-girlfriend. In 2003, his conviction was reversed, but it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2005.

* Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, was sentenced to hang in Pakistan for the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. The US government and Pearl's wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not responsible.

A Plea For Mercy: Campaigners rail at Musharraf as Briton faces execution tomorrow, I, 30.9.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article1772359.ece

2pm

Beckett defends Lebanon policy

Tuesday September 26, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Matthew Tempest and Will Woodward

The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, attempted to "nail the lie" today that Tony Blair's failure to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon this summer meant the government was not active behind the scenes during the controversial conflict.

Defending the government's stance - which led to a swath of Labour backbenchers demanding a recall of parliament to debate the crisis - Ms Beckett insisted the "sustainable ceasefire" formulation of Mr Blair's was the correct approach.

Ms Beckett said: "From the beginning, Tony [Blair] and I worked intensively behind the scenes to secure the earliest possible sustainable ceasefire.

"We were pushing for a security council resolution as early as the very start of August. And I believed it could have been achieved. So, by the way, were the United States.

"Delays beyond that date were not of our making but resulted exactly from unease about how to make the ceasefire sustainable."

However, Walter Wolfgang, the CND campaigner who heckled Mr Blair at last year's conference, accused Ms Beckett of having "blood on her hands" over the conflict, and called on her to resign.

"She skidded over troubled waters. She implied that we did all we could to obtain a ceasefire over Lebanon. This was not true," Mr Wolfgang - now an NEC member - said.

But her speech to delegates at the Labour conference in Manchester included only one passing reference to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It's within the UN that we seek backing for the democratically elected governments of Afghanistan and Iraq through international compacts of support as they seek to bring peace, prosperity and security to their troubled lands," she said.

Instead she left it to the defence secretary, Des Browne, to acknowledge the "differing views" among delegates on those two wars.

Mr Browne said the government was "trying to get the country to a point where we can bring our forces home without it slipping into civil war - this should be something around which we can unite".

However, he also attacked the Conservatives, accusing them of undermining British troops in Afghanistan by painting "a picture of confusion" about their mission.

Mr Browne said yesterday's attack in Helmand province, which killed 18 and wounded 17, was "more bad news", but he insisted: "This is not a failing mission."

Britain had always known that securing the south of Afghanistan would be difficult.

"We must never again let parts of Afghanistan become empty spaces on the map - playgrounds for terrorism."

Mr Browne said: "The Tories are trying to paint a picture of confusion in what we are doing in Afghanistan: confusion about whether our soldiers are being sent to destroy the livelihoods of poppy farmers; about whether we are there to rebuild, or to fight a war."

But the 5,000 British troops in Afghanistan understood the mission, Mr Browne said.

"Talk to our soldiers. They are not confused about what they are doing. Yes they are there to rebuild, but they cannot rebuild without first creating security - and that means fighting the Taliban and the drug lords who will do anything to prevent us creating security."

Mr Browne said it was Labour's duty "not to allow the Conservatives to get away with claiming to give this support while at the same time constantly undermining confidence in the way the mission is being carried out".

Despite their claims "every time we have gone to the Treasury for more money to support and protect our troops we have got it" - including £70m for new armoured vehicles for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beckett defends Lebanon policy, G, 26.9.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourconference2006/story/0,,1881438,00.html

Blair backs mass protest urging UN force for Darfur

Saturday September 16, 2006
Guardian
Jonathan Steele

Tony Blair takes the unusual step today of endorsing a mass protest on foreign policy, which will include an interfaith service at the gates of Downing Street.

The Global Day for Darfur, which is expected to include demonstrations and vigils in 32 countries tomorrow, is designed to press the government of Sudan to accept a UN peacekeeping force in its troubled western region. Seven thousand African Union monitors have failed to prevent a surge in violence since the signing of a peace deal between the government and one of three rebel factions in May.

"I do not understand the government of Sudan's rejection of the UN force or its threat to withdraw its welcome from the African Union," says the prime minister in a statement issued today. "Renewed violence has driven another 50,000 people to leave their homes, bringing the total number of displaced persons to 1.9m. Because of the fighting nearly half a million people are cut off from aid." He adds: "As the Global Day for Darfur demonstrates, urgent action is needed."

The prime minister's intervention follows a US plea for allied governments to match the diplomatic pressure Washington has been putting on Khartoum to end its resistance to having a UN force in Darfur. Although UN peacekeepers are helping to enforce a peace agreement in south Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir has accused western governments of wanting to "recolonise" Darfur.

Mr Blair's statement avoids the word genocide, which many critics of Khartoum say is under way in Darfur, and also presses the two rebel groups which refused the May peace deal to accept it now.

As well as the Downing Street service, protesters will rally outside the Sudanese embassy in London. September 17 was chosen because it marks the start of the UN general assembly's annual meeting in New York.

The African Union's mandate expires this month and the Sudanese government is threatening a big military offensive against the two rebel groups. The main wing of the Sudan Liberation Army, the largest rebel force, made peace in May.

Blair backs mass protest urging UN force for Darfur, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,,1873916,00.html

Black day for the British

Filed: 05/09/2006
The Daily Telegraph
By Thomas Harding, Defence Correspondent

Ministers are failing to give proper support to troops embroiled in a war on two fronts that has become "extraordinarily dangerous", a former head of the Armed Forces said yesterday.

Lord Guthrie's outspoken attack came on a day British soldiers and tourists were the target of terrorist attacks in three countries.

In Afghanistan one soldier was killed and another critically wounded by a suicide bomber in a 4x4 vehicle in the capital Kabul. In Iraq, a few hours later, two soldiers were killed in the southern city of Basra by a roadside bomb, bringing the number of British dead in both theatres of war to 18 in four days.

advertisementIn Jordan, a gunman shouted "God is great" in Arabic before firing into the backs of a group of sight-seers killing one and wounding six. The dead man, Christopher Stokes, 30, was visiting the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre in the capital Amman when the attacker opened fire.

Two other Britons, Karen Sparke and Katherine Mills, were hit by bullets but escaped serious injury.

The gunman, a Palestinian named as Nabil Ahmed Issa Jaoura, has lived for several years in the small Jordanian town of Zarqawi, the birthplace of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the terrorist notorious for beheading western hostages in Iraq.

Responding to the deaths, Tony Blair insisted that it was necessary to "stand firm" against terrorism.

He said: "The global terrorist threat, which is trying to stop these countries getting on their feet or to kill vulnerable, innocent people, like has happened today in Jordan, is aimed to make us lose heart and make us fearful about standing up for what is right. Our response has to be to stand firm. It's very tough for our Armed Forces at the moment, particularly in Afghanistan, but it is very important."

Lord Guthrie, the former chief of the defence staff, told The Daily Telegraph: "We are in two very serious insurgencies and although it is not general war we need to face facts that things are very serious. . . we are just muddling through. It is reprehensible that our politicians are hiding behind the generals."

The military is so short of money that there are plans to send units home for three months over Christmas to save fuel and food, senior defence sources disclosed. Exercises, vital to prepare soldiers for operations, have been reduced and training is at a dangerously low level.

The fighting in Helmand province in Afghanistan is growing in ferocity with troops under daily attack. Gurkhas in a platoon house are said to have to throw grenades over the wall to "keep insurgents at bay at night".

Commanders have made urgent requests for more helicopters to ferry troops and supplies and the MoD said it was rapidly trying to meet these needs. Despite reports of under-funding, the MoD insists that for operations the Treasury "has given us exactly what we wanted or asked for without exception".

Although it has been repeatedly denied by the Government over the past year, the planning for British operations in Afghanistan was based on the assumption that troop numbers in Iraq would be cut to almost half of the present total of 7,200. A military planner said Army chiefs' planning assumptions had been "blown out of the water".

As Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, arrived in Baghdad last night, British commanders continued their demands for more troops to take on insurgents.

Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, the new Chief of the General Staff, said in a newspaper interview that troops were working at the limits of their capacity and could only just cope with the demands placed upon them by the Government. He said the Army was "meeting challenges on the hoof", and called for a "national debate" over whether annual defence spending of £30 billion was enough.

Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, called on more countries to provide combat troops to Afghanistan as "not all Nato members involved are pulling their weight".

Black day for the British, DTel, 5.9.2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=TWBOPCSKRJ5K5QFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2006/09/05/wterror05.xml

Bush gives ground

as UN pushes Israel peace deal

· Draft plan calls for bombing to stop
· Blair welcomes move to end 'tragic crisis'

Sunday August 6, 2006
The Observer
Gaby Hinsliff, Ned Temko and Paul Harris in New York

A ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah forces in Lebanon moved decisively closer last night after America, Britain and France agreed an outline deal to resolve what Tony Blair described as a 'tragic crisis'.

A draft United Nations resolution hammered out in New York calls for a 'cessation of hostilities' between Israel and Hizbollah, following what senior Foreign Office sources said was a climbdown by Washington, which had been holding out for a 'suspension' of fire. Under the latter wording, Israel could more easily have resumed bombing at any time it felt threatened.

Crucially, however, the resolution does not demand an immediate halt to violence, which will be seen as pacifying Israel in turn. And hopes of an early peace were dashed last night as Lebanon indicated unhappiness with the draft, while both sides in the conflict indicated they were not yet ready to stop.

Nonetheless it is hoped that if the new resolution - to be discussed with other members of the Security Council today - is formally voted through by ministers tomorrow or Tuesday, international pressure will bring a swift halt to the bombing.

The Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, also told The Observer she was pushing Israel for the urgent creation of 'humanitarian corridors' in Lebanon to let food and medical supplies through to stricken civilians, with the offensive scaled down at least enough to give safe access to aid workers.

The new resolution states a ceasefire is dependent on 'in particular, the immediate cessation by Hizbollah of all attacks' - seen by some as a victory for Israel - but also on Tel Aviv halting all military offensives. It will be monitored by the current UN force in Lebanon, rather than waiting for an international stabilisation force to arrive and police it, as Israel and the US had originally insisted, and will prompt immediate work to begin on a detailed political settlement, including the demilitarisation of southern Lebanon.

Last night Tony Blair welcomed the tabling of the resolution. He said: 'This is an important first step in bringing this tragic crisis to an end. The priority now is to get the resolution adopted as soon as possible and then to work for a permanent ceasefire and achieve the conditions in Lebanon and Israel which will prevent a recurrence.'

He added that he would work 'tirelessly to re-energise the broader Middle East peace process' by moving to create a 'Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel'. He has told confidants he won a personal pledge from President George Bush last week to revive the search for a negotiated deal over Palestine and that further unilateral withdrawals by Israel from the occupied territories would risk 'complicating' the situation.

However the text met with some hostility in the Middle East. Asked whether Beirut accepted the text, Lebanese foreign ministry official Nouhad Mahmoud said 'no'; Mohammed Fneish, a Hizbollah member of the Lebanese cabinet, said his group would only stop fighting if Israeli troops quit Lebanon. The Israeli government did not respond officially, but tourism minister Isaac Herzog told an Israeli TV channel that it would not stop yet, adding: 'We still have the coming days for many military missions, but we have to know that the timetable is increasingly short.'

Israel yesterday warned residents in the port of Sidon to flee, suggesting it may maximise its impact in the time left. Yesterday it attacked Hizbollah guerrillas near Tyre in a raid which Lebanon said killed four civilians and a soldier, while three people were reported dead in Galilee after a Hizbollah rocket attack.

With the push to get the resolution formally adopted under way, a key priority is aid for refugees and bombing victims. Blair and Beckett have raised concerns with the Israelis in recent days over the destruction of key routes used by aid convoys. 'We have to get humanitarian aid flowing,' Beckett said.

'You can get hooked up [on the resolution] but in the meantime there are people who need food and water and medical care who are not necessarily getting it. We have raised concerns with the Israelis over a number of days about the need to have what you might call humanitarian corridors. We have to try and get a situation where the aid agencies can feel a greater degree of confidence in their ability to move humanitarian supplies.'

Britain wanted 'a reduction in levels of violence, a greater practical possibility of bringing in humanitarian relief' even before a formal ceasefire, she said. Blair spoke yesterday to Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, and to Oxfam about getting aid moving.

The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said yesterday that work would continue tomorrow to get the resolution adopted but that it had a deal with the main players, adding: 'We're prepared to move as quickly as other members of the council want to.'

The resolution calls for a ceasefire allowing work to begin on a longer-term political settlement, to include a respect on both sides for the so-called 'blue line' borders; a demilitarisation of the south, between the border and the Litani River - an area about 20 miles deep into Lebanon - with the disarming of Hizbollah guerrillas there and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who had moved into villages just over the border; and the 'elimination of foreign forces' in Lebanon. An international force would police this settlement, its mandate to be determined by a second resolution next week.

The resolution also calls for the release of kidnapped Israeli soldiers and settlement of the issue of Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel - giving the Secretary-General a month to produce proposals on disarmament and formally delineating Lebanon's disputed borders.

Both sides have gained and given ground to secure the deal, with Israel reserving the right to retaliate if Hizbollah rocket attacks continue and the US also giving way over the choreography of any ceasefire.

The text was all but agreed late Friday night, but the US and France remained deadlocked on whether to demand a cessation or suspension of violence. Britain adopted what officials called a 'pragmatic' position of neutrality. But for once, Paris held a trump card - it is supplying troops for the stabilisation force, and made clear it was not willing to have its soldiers fight their way in without a full ceasefire.

'What it means is the Americans have backed down - cessation is the key word,' said a senior Whitehall source.

In Britain, the Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell said any progress was welcome but it was a 'matter of profound regret' there was no call for an immediate ceasefire.

Beckett also admitted 'great concern' that the conflict could increase the radicalisation of young Muslims in Britain angered by the scenes of Arab suffering. Yesterday she resumed her interrupted caravan holiday with her husband, even though Blair has delayed his own family holiday. However, aides said Beckett would be back from her break in time for this week's UN meeting.

Bush gives ground as UN pushes Israel peace deal, O, 6.8.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838348,00.html

10.45am

Blair delays holiday to work on UN peace deal

Friday August 4, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Oliver King and agencies


Tony Blair today decided to delay his summer holiday for a few days to help secure a United Nations resolution that would call for an immediate cessation of hostilities in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

Mr Blair's decision, following that of his foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, to delay her own break, came as attempts to secure a diplomatic solution at the United Nations in New York yesterday continued to prove elusive.

Both protagonists in the conflict yesterday threatened to escalate their bombing campaigns and intensify the fighting before the international community finally united behind a new UN resolution.

Downing street said Mr Blair took the decision for logistical rather than political reasons because the prime minister felt the "crucial" time lost on a transatlantic flight to the Caribbean could be better spent on making diplomatic phone calls.

No 10 said the prime minister, who had been expected to leave today, believed the next few days were "crucial" in the efforts to agree a United Nations security council resolution on a ceasefire.

The prime minister's spokeswoman said he was speaking this morning to the French president, Jacques Chirac, about the French-drafted UN resolution , following a telephone conversation last night with the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan.

Mr Blair, who told reporters at his press conference yesterday that he was in regular contact with President Bush as well as the Israeli and Lebanese leaders, also expressed the hope that a UN resolution would be agreed within days.

But although diplomats remain confident of eventually securing a resolution, there was still a lack of urgency in New York, according the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman.

He reported that there was no indication if, or when, foreign ministers, including Margaret Beckett, might travel to New York to vote on the resolution.

Key principles in the draft resolution include respect for Israel and Lebanon's sovereignty, the release of two captured Israeli soldiers, and Lebanon's compliance with the security council's resolution 1559, requiring it to disarm Hizbullah.

The sticking points between the French and US positions continued to revolve around how to structure the process in order to elicit the cooperation of the two warring sides.

In one telling linguistic detail, diplomats considered changing "cessation of hostilities" to a phrase such as "cessation of offensive operations". This was to meet Israeli objections to the resolution because it did not allow for it to take defensive action in the event of a Hizbullah attack during a ceasefire.

Hizbullah indicated yesterday that even if a resolution was adopted by the security council, that would not necessarily bring fighting to an end.

Naim Kassem, Hizbullah's deputy leader, said it would not accept a ceasefire that did not include the withdrawal of all Israeli troops from "any land it might have occupied" in Lebanon during the present offensive, and that all those forced from their villages must be allowed to return.

It is expected that Mr Blair will resume his holiday plans "within the next day or so" Downing Street added.

Mr Blair told reporters yesterday that once on holiday he would remain in regular telephone contact with officials in London and world leaders regarding the conflict.

Blair delays holiday to work on UN peace deal, G, 4.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1837297,00.html

Blair begins fightback against backbench critics

· Hints he will lead Israel Palestine peace drive
· Bombing of Lebanon unacceptable, says PM

Friday August 4, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour

Tony Blair battled to quell the Labour revolt over his Lebanon policy yesterday by saying he had not given a green light to Israel's military operations, and insisting he was only interested in securing a long-term settlement that must also encompass a Palestinian state.
He also suggested he would personally lead a drive to re-energise the Palestinian peace process in September, claiming he would regard it as a personal failure of his leadership if he could not help negotiate a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

Mr Blair's hour-long exposition of his policy at a Downing Street press conference came after a cabinet and backbench revolt in the wake of the conflict in Lebanon and his own five-day absence in California. His remarks did not satisfy his most vocal critics, but cabinet members denied any coordinated revolt was being organised."It is not surprising to me that there are people who profoundly disagree with the policy," Mr Blair said. "Or that there is anxiety amongst members of the cabinet; members of the parliamentary Labour party; people in the country. This is a very difficult situation."

Ceasefire

Mr Blair gave his strongest criticism of Israel's bombing campaign, describing it as "unacceptable", but he refused to describe it as disproportionate.

Responding to Labour backbench demands for an unconditional ceasefire, he said: "I have got to try and get a solution to this, and the solution will not come by condemning one side, it will not come simply by statements that we make, it will only come by a plan that allows a ceasefire on both sides and then a plan to deal with the underlying cause, which is the inability of the government of Lebanon to take control of the whole of Lebanon."

The scale of the anger at next month's Labour conference may turn on whether he can, as he promised yesterday, re-energise the Palestinian peace process, and secure the active involvement of George Bush.

He said yesterday "much of the Arab and Muslim world do not think we approach [the Palestinian issue] in an even-handed way, and that in my view is of far greater significance than even the differing views of the tragedy in the Lebanon".

Downing Street suggested he would propose that the peace process needs to be "micro managed" in the way that the Northern Ireland peace process has been. One option would be to call a peace conference on the lines of the 1995 Dayton process for Bosnia in which the warring factions were effectively locked together until an accord was signed 21 days later.

Negotiations

Mr Blair suggested, for the first time, that it might be necessary to talk to elements of the democratically-elected Hamas government in Palestine, even though Hamas has not renounced violence or accepted Israel's existence.

He said he hoped a UN resolution could be passed by early next week but significantly he said it would require Israel only to suspend offensive operations - an acknowledgement that Israel will not accept a ceasefire which rules out acts of self-defence.

Mr Blair has come under severe criticism from backbench critics for being too close to Israel and the US. Unusually he acknowledged the internal splits saying: "I do not doubt there are people who disagree in the system and I do not doubt that there are cabinet ministers who have doubts about this or that aspect, or possibly the whole policy."

But he dismissed reports that he was in conflict with either the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, or with his foreign policy specialists in Downing Street as "complete rubbish".

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former ambassador to the UN, said Mr Blair should have criticised the scale of the Israeli bombing, and Michael Connarty, a Labour backbencher, said the prime minister was no longer listening to his party.

"All these deaths have occurred during the period in which he would not call for an absolute and immediate ceasefire," said Mr Connarty. "It's embarrassing and, as far as I'm concerned, it's entirely unacceptable."

Blair on ...

Labour dissent

The idea Margaret Beckett and I are at odds over this is complete rubbish. We have been at one. It's not surprising there are people who profoundly disagree with the policy ... this is a very, very difficult situation and when you see terrible scenes of bloodshed and the death of innocent civilians it is a terrible thing ... my job is to try to bring it to an end.

Israeli actions

The reason why this problem has arisen is that, in defiance of previous UN resolutions, Hizbullah have continued to operate with their militias outside the control of the government of Lebanon down in the south of Lebanon. No one is giving anyone a green light [to continue military action]. That is just not correct.

Diplomatic strategy

The UK and France, with the US and others, are in intense negotiations - I hope it may be possible, even within 24 or 48 hours, for people to see the [UN] resolution we are working on. Then, provided the three of us are in the same place, it should be days to get ... [agreement].

Iran and Syria

Nobody is contemplating military action [against them]. If they want an opportunity to come into the international community and participate fully they can do so - but it's got to be on basis that they're not exporting terrorism around the region or in the case of Iran trying to acquire a nuclear weapon in breach of international law. I find it quite shocking that the president of Iran says the solution is to eliminate Israel. How helpful is that at this moment in time, when ... the rockets that have been fired into Israel are very similar, if not identical, to those used against British forces in Basra?

Leaving John Prescott in charge

In relation to whatever I'll be doing in the next few days, the most important thing is to realise that, wherever I am, I have got full communications ... The truth is that several of the leaders I am speaking to are actually on holiday as well.

Blair begins fightback against backbench critics, G, 4.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1837149,00.html

3pm

Aid groups urge Blair to back ceasefire

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
David Fickling and agencies


A coalition of aid agencies has appealed to Tony Blair to reverse his Middle East policy and call for an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war.

The agencies, including Christian Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children and Islamic Relief, announced in Beirut that Lebanon could be on the brink of a major humanitarian crisis.

Christian Aid's emergencies specialist, Dominic Nutt, warned that the country could be suffering an "underground disaster" even bigger than hitherto realised and that the population would be "close to breaking point" in a fortnight's time.

"It is stunningly simple. We're calling for a ceasefire, with all the UK agencies - in common with the rest of the world, it seems, apart from Bush and Blair," he said.

"We're calling on Tony Blair to have the moral courage to reverse his policy and call, without qualification, for an immediate ceasefire."

The International Organisation for Migration announced this week that 900,000 people have been driven from their homes in southern Lebanon, and prime minister Fouad Siniora said today that 900 Lebanese had been killed and more than 3,000 injured in 23 days of fighting.

Mr Nutt warned that aid groups were unable to operate in large swathes of the country because of the risk of Israeli bombardment.

He also said children, the old and infirm, and the poor were suffering the most from the conflict.

"This is not a tsunami where you can see the people who have been affected," he said. "By definition, many people are in hiding. They have run away from the bombing."

Oxfam worker Shaista Aziz said that the region was "imploding". "It is day 23 of the conflict and there is no more room for waiting. It is an absolute disgrace," she said.

"This is a clear message to Tony Blair, George Bush and Western leaders - enough is enough. The longer it goes on, the more anger towards the western world increases."

Mr Blair is facing a growing revolt within the Labour party and civil service over his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire.

Yesterday he attempted to justify his stance in a speech in California in which he said that any ceasefire would have to be coupled with a promise to disarm Hizbullah, and in his monthly press conference today he conceded that some ministers had reservations about his position.

Moves to broker a ceasefire agreement through the UN security council were now "coming together", he said.

Aid agencies, which often remain silent on contentious political issues, have been some of the most vocal critics of Mr Blair's Middle East policy since the start of the war in Lebanon.

Last week a group of agencies wrote an open letter to the prime minister calling on him to "rethink your policy as a matter of urgency", and on Tuesday a group including Islamic Relief Worldwide, Save the Children, War on Want, World Vision UK, Cafod, Care International, Christian Aid and Oxfam handed a 35,000-strong petition into Downing Street calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Aid groups urge Blair to back ceasefire, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1836643,00.html

1pm

PM admits divisions but says UN peace plan imminent

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Oliver King and agencies

Tony Blair admitted today that a "couple of ministers" had doubts about his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict but told his critics that a United Nations resolution to bring about an "immediate ceasefire" would be agreed within days.

But Mr Blair told reporters at his monthly press conference that reports of a split with his foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, were "complete rubbish" and that both were "at one" in working hard for a practical solution to the crisis at the UN.

"The US, the UK, France and others have been working very hard to get agreement on a United Nations resolution and I am now hopeful that we will have such a resolution down very shortly and agreed within the next few days," Mr Blair said.

Mr Blair did accept though that there were officials "within the system" and a "couple of ministers" who have doubts about the policy, but he dismissed reports of serious splits, saying "it always happens" in such situations.

Asked about comments by senior Labour MPs who have expressed anger and "despair" at his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, Mr Blair said their criticisms were "not surprising" but they were just "talking about it" with a plan to end the conflict.

"The difference between me and those people who are criticising me is not that I am indifferent to the suffering of people in the Lebanon," he insisted.

"On the contrary, I stand in complete solidarity and sympathy with people in the Lebanon, innocent people who have died in Israel as well, in what is a terrible, terrible situation, but my job is to bring it to an end. You don't bring it to an end unless you have got a plan to do so."

On the diplomatic manoeuvres in the UN security council in New York Mr Blair said, "This is obviously a critical time. I think it is coming together. I think the remaining differences are very slight."

"The purpose ... will be to bring about an immediate ceasefire and then put in place the conditions of the international force to come in, in support of the Lebanese government, so we get the underlying issues and problems dealt with."

Mr Blair said that it was "vital" to have a genuine ceasefire on both sides, as well as addressing issues raised by Fuad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, and Israel's requirement for security on its northern border.

Israel has got to "be sure that whatever arrangements are in place guarantee that security for the medium and long term", he said.

Mr Blair condemned comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, calling for the destruction of Israel as a solution to the Middle East crisis, as "deeply unhelpful".

    PM admits divisions but says UN peace plan imminent, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1836524,00.html

11.45am

Former diplomats turn on Blair over Lebanon

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Oliver King

Already facing a backlash from within the cabinet and the Labour party over the Middle East, Tony Blair was also publicly attacked today by two former British ambassadors over his backing for George Bush's stance on the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

Comments by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a retired former ambassador to Moscow who also served as chairman of the joint intelligence committee, and Sir Oliver Miles, a former ambassador to Libya, revealed the depth of division between the prime minister and the Foreign Office establishment.

Mr Blair, who will face questions from reporters at noon today about his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict, has damaged British interests - according to Sir Oliver - through his "unthinking adoption of the Israeli side of the story".

The public criticism from the former diplomats comes as the Guardian reports today that Mr Blair has not only ignored the advice of the Foreign office but also that of his own foreign affairs specialists within Downing Street.

Writing on the Guardian's comment is free website today, Sir Oliver, one of the 52 former ambassadors who wrote an open letter criticising Tony Blair's Iraq policy in 2004, says the prime minister's lumping together of radical islamist groups in the region is an "oversimplification to the point where it interferes with the facts".

"There is little indication that he has grasped the horror of what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon; still less that he is aware that Lebanon today is a repeat of what happened when Israel invaded last time. This is in strong contrast with the empathy he shows for Israelis," Sir Oliver writes.

The more vitriolic attack comes from Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who has previously criticised Mr Blair's manipulation of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war. Writing in the Financial Times today, Sir Rodric says that Tony Blair's premiership has descended into "scandal and incoherence" and that he should resign immediately.

Sir Rodric mocks Mr Blair for being a "frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussauds" programmed by the CIA "to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent".

Mr Blair, Sir Rodric claims is "stiff in opinions, but often in the wrong; he has manipulated public opinion, sent our soldiers into distant lands for ill-conceived purposes... and reduced the Foreign Office to a demoralised cipher because it keeps reminding him of inconvenient facts."

Mr Blair is constructing foreign policy out of "self-righteous soundbites", Sir Rodric writes.

"Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago... Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself; who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ grinder?"

Sir Rodric concludes that Tony Blair's foreign policy leaves Britain vulnerable to al-Qaida attacks: "And though he chooses not to admit it, he has made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks." Whitehall officials told the Guardian's diplomatic editor, Ewen MacAskill, today that the government's policy of resisting calls for an immediate ceasefire had been "driven by the prime minister alone".

    Former diplomats turn on Blair over Lebanon, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1836440,00.html


 

MPs attack government for breaking its own guidelines on arms sales to Israel

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian
Richard Norton-Taylor


The government must explain why it continues to approve the sale of arms to Israel in apparent breach of its own guidelines, a cross-party committee of senior backbenchers demand today.

In a hard-hitting report, MPs from four Commons committees say arms sales are regularly approved to countries the government itself censures because of their poor human rights record.

The report also exposes loopholes which allow companies to sell products - often via the internet - that are officially banned, including equipment such as "thumb cuffs" and "wall cuffs" used in torture.

The government last year approved £22.5m worth of arms-related exports to Israel, almost twice the amount in 2004. They included components for combat helicopters, aircraft radars and air-to-surface missiles. British companies also make crucial parts for US-made Apache helicopters and display units for US F-16s, both used by Israeli forces in Lebanon and the occupied territories.

Government guidelines say export licences would not be agreed if there was a "clear risk" they might be used for internal repression or would "provoke or prolong armed conflict or aggravate existing tensions or conflicts". Ministers have also said they would block the sale of equipment which could be deployed "aggressively" in the occupied territories.

The MPs say the government must explain how British officials in Israel "who are observing the use to which exported equipment is put carry out their work". It would help, they add, if the government gave examples of equipment blocked for export to Israel.

"The only thing that matters is end use - who uses it, and to what purpose," said Roger Berry, Labour chairman of the quadripartite committee which unanimously approved today's report and included members of the Commons foreign affairs, defence, international development and trade and industry select committees.

MPs want to know "what the [government's] policy actually means and how it is implemented in practice", Mr Berry told the Guardian. In a reference to Israel, he asked: "If the guidelines do not apply in those circumstances, where do they apply?"

Margaret Beckett was yesterday threatened with legal action unless she bans the supply of British military equipment to Israel. Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, has written to the foreign secretary saying the sale of arms to Israel is unlawful and makes Britain complicit in breaches of international law by Israel.

Ministers are also facing possible legal action by allowing US planes carrying bombs to Israel to use British airfields. British officials made clear yesterday that the goverment will continue to allow the flights to land here to refuel. "Provided proper procedures are met, permission will be granted," said a Foreign Office spokesman.

After the row over US planes carrying weapons bound for Israel landing at Prestwick in Scotland, future flights are likely to use military rather than civilian airfields.

Two flights diverted from Prestwick last weekend were seen at the US airforce base at Mildenhall in Suffolk. Peace campaigners say they have also seen a cargo plane with markings in Hebrew at the RAF base at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

The flights are believed to have been carrying "bunker buster" bombs, with depleted uranium warheads. A Glasgow-based human rights lawyer, Aamer Anwar, said the government's actions violated the European human rights convention, the Geneva convention, and the International Criminal Court Act 2001. "There's no point in repeatedly saying it's a breach of international law and nobody trying to get to court," he said. "We will try."

In their report today on the arms trade, the MPs say Britain still does not ban trade in items used in torture, including thumb cuffs, wall cuffs and "sting sticks" - Chinese-made metal rods with barbs attached. The case for banning them immediately was overwhelming, say the MPs.

The government argues that it cannot add anything to its list of banned items without the agreement of its European partners. Such equipment in future will be controlled by an "EU torture regulation", says today's report.

Evidence about trade in torture equipment seen by the committee was gathered by Mark Thomas, the political activist and comedian, and by the Guardian, partly from London arms fairs. The committee says the government must in future "actively seek out breaches of export controls at arms fairs". The MPs say the government must police the internet looking for companies "promoting or pursuing business in breach of export controls".

Under scrutiny

· The MPs say Britain's arms export policy must be more transparent

· The government must explain its approval of arms sales to Israel

· The MPs question the sale of arms to countries with poor human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia

· Arms embargo on China must stay

· The MPs express concern about the way British Land Rovers, made under licence in Turkey, were used by Uzbek troops during the Andijan massacre last year

· The government must do more to find out how British equipment with dual (civil as well as military) purposes is used abroad

· Companies which use the internet to breach arms export controls must be vigorously pursued

    MPs attack government for breaking its own guidelines on arms sales to Israel, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835936,00.html

Hague's criticism of Israel enrages leading Tory donor

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian
Will Woodward, chief political correspondent

One of the Conservative party's leading donors yesterday accused William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, of behaving like an "ignorant armchair critic" in criticising the Israeli attack on Lebanon.

Lord Kalms, a former party treasurer who has given more than £500,000 to the Tories since 2001, condemned Mr Hague's use of the word "disproportionate" in describing the Israeli action.

In a letter to the Spectator, Lord Kalms, former head of Dixons, said Mr Hague's "usual good sense has deserted him".

David Cameron, the Tory leader, and Mr Hague believe they have exploited divisions inside the government by being prepared, unlike Tony Blair, to use the word "disproportionate". Last month Mr Hague stoked frustration among Labour MPs over Mr Blair's reluctance to criticise Israel by telling the Commons: "I think we can say that elements of the Israeli response are disproportionate, including attacks on Lebanese army units, the loss of civilian life and essential infrastructure and such enormous damage to the capacity of the Lebanese government."

But Lord Kalms urged him: "Think again, William, for whom you speak. How do you deal with the Hizbullah leader, Nasrallah, who is committed to Israel's total destruction ... and who rains thousands of rockets on Israel, keeping the population in shelters, devastating industry, kidnapping and killing Israeli soldiers within Israeli territory?"

Lord Kalms argued: "Proportionality in common terminology might mean tit for tat. Do you, William, really believe this to be a serious possibility or a practical response to Hizbullah's genocide policy?".

He said his comments were not merely unhelpful but "downright dangerous".

Oliver Letwin, Mr Cameron's policy chief, told Radio 4's The World at One yesterday: "Stanley's a great man but we don't agree with him about this." He added: "Of course we all recognise the right of the state of the Israel to defend itself, of course we recognise that we all want to see peace very fast. But the fact is there has been some disproportionality ... the prime minister has belatedly caught up with the principle that we have actually to get peace to happen."

The former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith signalled in an article last week that he was unhappy with Mr Hague's stand and the shadow defence secretary, Liam Fox, offered strong sympathy with the Israelis. But Mr Hague's line has so far been generally supported by the Tory backbenches.

    Hague's criticism of Israel enrages leading Tory donor, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835923,00.html

Blair: You've misunderstood me over the Middle East

· PM to confront critics today at press conference
· Dismay at approach spreading through party

Thursday August 3, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill

Tony Blair will face down his critics today over his controversial handling of the Middle East crisis by insisting that he has been working throughout for a ceasefire in Lebanon and that his position has been misunderstood. He will argue at a Downing Street press conference that he wanted a ceasefire, but only if it was coupled with a clear understanding that the Hizbullah militia would be disarmed.

Mr Blair, who returned from his US trip yesterday, will say that he is trying to secure a durable settlement, rather than a short-term fix which would leave armed militias operating on the border of Israel.

But Mr Blair has being criticised publicly and privately by ministers and senior backbenchers, and has antagonised most members of the EU as well as the United Nations secretariat.

It emerged yesterday that he ignored not only the advice of the Foreign Office but foreign affairs specialists in Downing Street, who argued that the Israeli offensive was counter-productive and favoured a call for an immediate ceasefire.

Critics inside the Labour party said Labour MPs, dispersed throughout the country because of the parliamentary recess, were in despair over his handling of the crisis, and a 12-strong group of backbench MPs, including many Muslim MPs, led by Mohammed Sarwar, called for a return of parliament to discuss the crisis.

Joan Ruddock, a former minister, said there was a sense of "despair" within Labour ranks. "I have not met any member of the Labour party who actually agrees with our strategy," she told BBC Radio 4's The World At One. "I really can't envisage at the moment how the party conference will go. There is enormous anger, disappointment and the sense that there has to be a change of direction, but that the damage has been done. "

The chairman of the parliamentary Labour party, Ann Clwyd, who was an unwavering supporter of Mr Blair in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and is in regular contact with him over the Lebanon issue, also said feelings were running high. "Before the recess ... a lot of people were very angry. I think the vast majority of them felt that there should be a ceasefire and the vast majority of them are very critical of Israeli policy."

Mr Blair suffered a blow from an unexpected source yesterday when the UN deputy secretary general, Mark Malloch Brown, urged him to take a back seat, calling his involvement in the negotiations on ending the crisis counter-productive. "It's important to know not just when to lead but when to follow," he said.

The US state department went to Mr Blair's rescue. Sean McCormack, the state department spokesman, said: "We are seeing a troubling pattern of a high official of the UN who seems to be making it his business to criticise member states and, frankly, with misplaced and misguided criticisms."

Ministers privately conceded yesterday that the crisis had damaged the prime minister, and that there was frustration, rather than outright revolt, around the cabinet table. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, who is almost certain to replace him as prime minister, has so far said nothing publicly about the Lebanon crisis.

Mr Blair could face more sniping after opting last night to press ahead with his summer family holiday this weekend rather than delay to concentrate on trying to help negotiate an end to the conflict. After a strategy meeting in Downing Street last night, his aides insisted he could be in contact with world leaders during his Caribbean holiday. His departure will leave the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, in charge.

Mr Blair has been leading almost single-handedly the British telephone diplomacy with world leaders on the shape of a UN resolution to resolve the conflict. Although the resolution could be voted on by early next week, there are still big problems ahead, with questions over whether either Israel or Hizbullah would accept a ceasefire and which countries would contribute to a proposed international force for southern Lebanon.

Mr Blair will also be pressed today to produce substance to back his claim in a foreign policy speech in Los Angeles that a dramatic change was needed in the west's approach to the fight against global terrorism.

    Blair: You've misunderstood me over the Middle East, G, 3.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835955,00.html

Blair admits Lebanon violence could fuel extremism

August 03, 2006
Times Online
By Jenny Booth
 

Tony Blair today acknowledged that there was a risk that the destruction and death in the Middle East could fuel extremism.

The Prime Minister said that in the short term the outrage at civilian deaths in Lebanon could make finding a solution to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah harder.

"It's a perfectly valid point that there may be so much damage done in the short term that it becomes more difficult to find a long term solution in the future," said Mr Blair.

"No sentient human being could fail to be moved by the suffering and death. It's terrible."

But, he added, this only fuelled his determination to find a lasting solution to the conflict that could pave the way for a long term peace.

Mr Blair was seeking to face down the voices of criticism that have grown louder while he has been away on a six day visit to the United States. His stance on Lebanon and Israel - blocking calls for an immediate ceasefire and refusing to criticise Israel's military campaign in southern Lebanon that has left more than 700 people dead on the Lebanese side, as well as more than 50 in Israel - has caused enormous unease in the Cabinet, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the country at large.

Jack Straw, the leader of the Commons, became the most senior Labour figure openly to voice dissent, when last weekend he called Israel's bombing of Lebanon "disproportionate" - a legally loaded term that hints at war crimes.

Today Mr Blair said that he was not surprised that people in the Cabinet had doubts. But he drew a distinction between voicing distress at the deaths and wanting them to stop at once - a view which he said everyone shared - and the process of finding a working solution.

"It doesn't surprise me at all that people are concerned or worried. I don't disrespect what they say, or fail to understand why they say it. But I am trying to get a practical solution."

He appeared to aim a sideswipe at armchair critics of his stance who had no alternative long term policy. Any ceasefire would have to be agreed by both sides - and that meant it must be agreed by the Hezbollah ministers in the government of Fouad SIniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, as well as the more moderate voices, he said.

"There's no point saying there has got to be a ceasefire, but only on one side," he told a Downing Street press conference

"Unless we get an agreement that involves not just Prime Minister Siniora but the whole government of Lebanon, and put it in place in such a way that it's going to hold, we are just expressing a view, we are not getting the job done.

"The reason for the problem is that, in defiance of UN Resolution 1559 (which called for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of sectarian militias), Hezbollah has continued to operate with their militia in the south of Lebanon. The conflict started when Hezbollah crossed the UN blue line.

"We grieve for the innocent Israelis who have died, we grieve for the innocent Lebanese who have died. A solution will not come by sympathising with one side, or by the statements we make, it will only come by dealing with both sides."

He strongly played down accusations that the rifts in his Cabinet were serious, categorically denying reports that he has had differences with Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, or that senior Foreign Office officials had been pleading with him to take a different tack.

Mr Blair returned to elements of a foreign policy speech he gave in the US last week, stating that the Middle East and the world faced a stark choice between extremism and moderation. The West must work with moderate Muslim opinion for long term peace, stability and democracy, or hand over the fate of the Middle East to the religious extremists, he warned.

This meant a redefinition of President Bush's war on terror to work with Muslim moderates, Mr Blair said. He warned that the disquiet felt in moderate Islamic countries that nothing is being done to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was very serious issue, and said that it was important to get back to underlying issue of MIddle East peace process as soon as Lebanon has quietened down.

Mr Blair condemned as shocking and very unhelpful the comments made today by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, that the solution to the Middle East crisis lay in the elimination of Israel.

Syria and Iran should try to help to solve problem, he said.

He denied that anyone was proposing military action against either state, but strongly attacked Iran for arming and financing Hezbollah - with virtually identical weaponry to the bombs being used against British soldiers in Basra, he added pointedly - and for trying to seek an atomic bomb in defiance of international law.

Mr Blair also said he was disappointed at the court ruling that control orders - intended to allow for the monitoring of terror suspects - breached human rights.

He added that plans for identity cards would go ahead in Britain, to combat terrorism. MPs are due to publish a report tomorrow on the spiralling costs of the identity cards scheme.

    Blair admits Lebanon violence could fuel extremism, Ts, 3.8.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,17129-2297586,00.html

6pm update

Blair returns to growing backlash on Lebanon

Wednesday August 2, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Matthew Tempest and Oliver King

Tony Blair flew back to Britain from the United States tonight to face a growing backlash in the Labour Party about his backing of George Bush's stance in the in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

And a senior official at the United Nations joined Labour backbenchers in expressing dismay that Mr Blair had refused to back international calls for an immediate ceasefire.

A former Labour minister, Joan Ruddoch, claimed the party was "in despair" at the position the prime minister had taken and Ann Clywd, the chair of the parliamentary party, said that the "vast majority" of his Labour backbenchers wanted a ceasefire.

Meanwhile, human rights lawyers have outlined moves to challenge the American use of Scottish airports for the transporting of arms to Israel.

This morning, Kofi Annan's deputy at the United Nations delivered a blunt put-down to the PM - who outlined his fears of an "arc of extremism" in the Middle East in a speech in Los Angeles last night.

The UN's deputy secretary general, Mark Malloch Brown, said that the current crisis should be dealt with by France, the US, Egypt and Jordan - with the UK "following not leading" on Lebanon.

In an interview with the Financial Times Mr Malloch Brown said that the crisis between Israel and Lebanon could not be resolved by "the team that led on Iraq".

"This cannot be perceived as a US-UK deal with Israel," he added.

Mr Malloch Brown - who is British - said that the UK and US were poorly placed to broker a deal over Lebanon because of their role in bringing about war in Iraq.

"One of my first bosses taught me it's important to know not just when to lead, but when to follow. For the UK, this is one to follow.

"We need [the French president, Jacques] Chirac and Bush, or Chirac, Bush and [the Egyptian president, Hosni] Mubarak and [Jordanian King] Abdullah on a podium, not President Bush and Mr Blair."

Ms Clwyd said that the "vast majority" of Labour MPs were "very critical" of Mr Blair's Israeli policy and wanted a ceasefire to get humanitarian aid to the Lebanese civilians.

Ms Clwyd defended Mr Blair from accusations of "taking his eye off the ball" regarding the plight of the Palestinians, but she said it was "nonsense" to think that Hizbullah could be eradicated.

"It's like veins running through the body of the Lebanon," she told the BBC's Good Morning Wales radio programme.

"Before the recess, in the run-up to the end of our session, a lot of people were very angry.

"I think the vast majority of [Labour backbenchers] felt that there should be a ceasefire and the vast majority of them are very critical of Israeli policy.

"That I know is a fact because that is a view that has been expressed very strongly in the House of Commons."

She did not criticise the PM, saying: "He has not taken his mind off the ball I can tell you that. I know the amount of time he has spent phoning individuals up, attempting to get some movement on what is a very difficult issue.

"He wants conflict to end. His argument is there's no point in having a pretend ceasefire.

"We have seen that of course in the last 48 hours where Israel was supposed to cease its air bombardment, but certainly that didn't happen. It continued on and off.

"He wants a ceasefire that's going to be meaningful."

But she added that "some of us would like a ceasefire at any price" in order to get humanitarian aid to the Lebanese.

In another interview, with the BBC, former foreign office minister Tony Lloyd bemoaned the UK's loss of influence with allies such as Egypt and Jordan, and expressed the hope Mr Blair's speech represented a "rowing away" from Washington's stance.

He said: "Any sensible observer would have said that these last weeks and days have meant that Britain's influence on the people worth influencing - our friends like Egypt, our friends like Jordan - is smaller now than it would have been at the start of this present conflict.

"If the Foreign Office were advising a much more cautious approach, a much more sensible approach, an approach that said that values do consist of not bombing the life out of the civilian population of the Lebanon, then the Foreign Office would, of course, be right in that.

"I hope it's a rowing away from Washington. I do hope, very fervently, that what we can see, for example, is a recognition that most of the issues in the Middle East that we've got to resolve - the settlement, for example, of the question of Iran's nuclear ambition - have been probably made more difficult by the last three weeks, not easier.

"An independent Palestine is more likely to see a democratically-elected Hamas element in any government and a democratic Lebanon would almost certainly see a stronger Hizbullah.

"That's the price we all pay for the last three weeks.

"I think people this morning waking up in the slums of the now broken cities and towns of the Lebanon might wonder about the values being stronger and better and more just, and would look at America as being part of the problem, frankly, not part of the solution," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

"US-inspired policies see Iraq engulfed in problems, Afghanistan not finished and Israel tearing apart both the Lebanon and Gaza."

In Glasgow today, human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar, backed by the Stop the War coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain, outlined possible legal action to stop flights carrying weapons from the US to Israel via Britain.

Acting on behalf of Lebanese clients, Mr Anwar argues that the UK's continued permission for the flights is a breach of international law.

The landing at Prestwick airport near Glasgow last week of two US aircraft believed to be carrying bombs to Israel sparked major protests.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said yesterday that US military planes en route to the Middle East can land at UK airfields "as long as the proper procedures are followed".

It would not confirm reports that only military, rather than civilian, airfields would be used for the flights.

The Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil, Dai Havard, today wrote to Mr Blair telling him that he was "deluded" if he thought he had any influence over Mr Bush and accusing him of a "misdirected obsession" with being a mouthpiece for the Bush administration.

He said that the prime minister and the US were "sanctioning the wrong strategy" in the region by assisting Israel in getting arms.

The "real effect" of that was the misuse of materiel in the Israeli attack on Qana, "and by association making the British people culpable in such actions".

Mr Havard said that the prime minister's position was "morally indefensible", "stupid" and out of kilter with the middle England voters that he wooed in 1997.

In the letter he wrote: "We need you to change the 'realpolitik' not by retaining the delusion that you 'have the ear of Bush', but by stating what is morally, politically and strategically right.

"I recognise that action is required on both sides of the conflict but the misdirected obsession with continuing to publicly mouth the same policy as the Bush administration in order to convince yourself and others that this gives you the ability to influence and ameliorate its actions is a deluded pretence, which we all need you to abandon."

He said that Mr Blair's stance isolated Britain in the Middle East.

"It is misguided and counter-productive as well as sanctioning unacceptable actions," Mr Havard wrote.

"Whatever the detail of individual incidents, the reality remains that you are, in effect, sanctioning the wrong strategy, wrong tactics and unacceptable actions and that must stop now."

The prime minister will face tough questioning on his stance on the war in the Lebanon when he hosts his monthly press conference in London tomorrow.

Mr Blair is expected to leave for his August family holiday in Barbados shortly after tomorrow's grilling.

    Blair returns to growing backlash on Lebanon, G, 2.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835538,00.html

We must rethink the War on Terror - Blair

- New strategy needed to defeat militant Islam
- Downing Street rift with Foreign Office over Israel


August 02, 2006
The Times
By Rosemary Bennett in Los Angeles and David Charter

FIVE years into the War on Terror, Tony Blair called yesterday for a “complete renaissance of our strategy” to defeat militant Islam.

Speaking in Los Angeles, the Prime Minister admitted that the use of force alone had alienated Muslim opinion, and said that there was now an “arc of extremism” stretching across the Middle East and beyond. He called for an “alliance of moderation” that would combat terrorism using values as much as military might.

On a day when four British soldiers were killed by insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Prime Minister’s words were an apparent admission that the use of military force alone had failed.

His speech came amid growing Cabinet dissent and backbench unease that Britain was too readily following Washington’s lead over the Middle East. Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, deliberately broke the Cabinet line last week by criticising Israel’s response as disproportionate.

The Times has learnt that the Foreign Office tried and failed to get Mr Blair to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon when he saw Mr Bush last Friday. It had also failed to persuade No 10 to stop US aircraft delivering weapons to Israel from using British airports.

Aides to Mr Blair described his speech to the World Affairs Council as a challenge to the US, not a change of attitude. They said it was “nonsense” to suggest Mr Blair was having doubts about war in Iraq. But dissident Labour MPs were delighted. Fabian Hamilton, who sits on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said that he hoped the party and the Muslim community would welcome the speech, “even if they might say ‘ it’s about time, too’.”

He continued: “It was obvious from the start that you do not fight terror by condemning a whole section of the world community as extremists and exacerbating that by supporting the dreadful bombing on Lebanon. It sounds like he has seen the light.”

Mr Blair said that once peace had been restored in Lebanon “we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those who threaten us”. To defeat extremism, the world needed an “alliance of moderation to paint a different future in which Muslim and Christian, Arab and Westerner, wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other.

“We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in the applications of those values to the world. At present we are far away from persuading those we need to persuade that this is true.”

The West had to address issues such as poverty, climate change, trade, but above all to “bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Palestine and Israel”. Unless that happened “we will not win, and it is a battle we must win”.

In an implicit rebuke to Mr Bush, Mr Blair said that an opportunity had been missed when Israel pulled out of Gaza. “That could have been and should have been the opportunity to restart the peace process. Progress will not happen unless we change radically our degree of focus effort and engagement, especially with the Palestinian side. In this, active leadership of the US is essential but also of the participation of Europe, of Russia and of UN.

“We need . . . to put a viable Palestinian government on its feet, to offer a vision of how the roadmap to final-status negotiation can happen and then pursue it week in, week out until it’s done. Nothing else is more important to the success of our foreign policy.”

Mr Blair’s speech followed growing tensions over his tough approach to the Lebanon conflict. The Times understands that Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, who endorsed the unsuccessful move to try to persuade Mr Blair to push for an immediate ceasefire, had made it plain to the Prime Minister that a wide body of opinion in the Foreign Office and the Labour Party was strongly opposed to his tactics.

Plans for Mr Blair’s holiday, which was due to start this weekend, were under review because of the Lebanon conflict, officials said.

    We must rethink the War on Terror - Blair, Ts, 2.8.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2295604,00.html

6pm

Blair calls for complete rethink of Middle East policy

Tuesday August 1, 2006
Press Association
Guardian Unlimited

The prime minister will tonight call for a radical rethink of foreign policy in the wake of the Israel-Lebanon crisis.

In a keynote address to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles Mr Blair will say that the battle of ideas must be joined in the struggle to make sure the forces of moderate Islam prevail over reactionary and terrorist elements.

He will say that "a complete renaissance of our strategy" is needed to combat "an arc of extremism stretching across the Middle East".

Mr Blair will tell his 2,000-strong audience: "I planned the basis of this speech several weeks ago. The crisis in the Lebanon has not changed its thesis. It has brought it into sharp relief.

"The purpose of the provocation that began the conflict was clear: it was to create chaos, division and bloodshed to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it."

The PM will go on to say: "It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding but it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done.

"We will continue to do all we can to halt the hostilities but once that has happened we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us.

"There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and clutching with increasing definition countries far outside that region.

"To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian, Arab and Western, wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other.

"We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world."

Mr Blair will go on to concede: "In reality we are at present far away from persuading those we need to persuade that this is true.

"Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to make peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win, and this is a battle we must win.

"What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

"It is in part a struggle between what I will call reactionary Islam and moderate mainstream Islam but its implications go far wider.

"We are fighting a war but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values."

Mr Blair's official spokesman said the Prime Minister - due to go on holiday later this week - was reviewing his plans day by day to see whether he needed to stay in the UK to deal with the current crisis.

However, most observers believe Mr Blair will take his holiday as planned but keep in constant touch with fellow world leaders.

    Blair calls for complete rethink of Middle East policy, G, 1.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1835022,00.html

Speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council        1 August 2006

The Prime Minister has delivered a major foreign policy speech on the Middle East to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

In the speech he called for a "complete renaissance" on foreign policy to combat "Reactionary Islam".

PM calls for "complete renaissance" on foreign policy
Parts of this transcript may have been edited

Find out why some transcripts are edited

Read the Prime Minister's speech[check against delivery]

Overnight, the news came through that as well as continuing conflict in the Lebanon, Britain's Armed Forces suffered losses in Iraq and Afghanistan. It brings home yet again the extraordinary courage and commitment of our armed forces who risk their lives and in some cases tragically lose them, defending our country's security and that of the wider world. These are people of whom we should be very proud.

I know the US has suffered heavy losses too in Iraq and in Afghanistan. We should never forget how much we owe these people, how great their bravery, and their sacrifice.

I planned the basis of this speech several weeks ago. The crisis in the Lebanon has not changed its thesis. It has brought it into sharp relief.

The purpose of the provocation that began the conflict was clear. It was to create chaos, division and bloodshed, to provoke retaliation by Israel that would lead to Arab and Muslim opinion being inflamed, not against those who started the aggression but against those who responded to it.

It is still possible even now to come out of this crisis with a better long-term prospect for the cause of moderation in the Middle East succeeding. But it would be absurd not to face up to the immediate damage to that cause which has been done.

We will continue to do all we can to halt the hostilities. But once that has happened, we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us. There is an arc of extremism now stretching across the Middle East and touching, with increasing definition, countries far outside that region. To defeat it will need an alliance of moderation, that paints a different future in which Muslim, Jew and Christian; Arab and Western; wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other. My argument to you today is this: we will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world.

The point is this. This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind.

9/11 in the US, 7/7 in the UK, 11/3 in Madrid, the countless terrorist attacks in countries as disparate as Indonesia or Algeria, what is now happening in Afghanistan and in Indonesia, the continuing conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, it is all part of the same thing. What are the values that govern the future of the world? Are they those of tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity or those of reaction, division and hatred? My point is that this war can't be won in a conventional way. It can only be won by showing that our values are stronger, better and more just, more fair than the alternative. Doing this, however, requires us to change dramatically the focus of our policy.

Unless we re-appraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win. And this is a battle we must win.

What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.

It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.

The root causes of the current crisis are supremely indicative of this. Ever since September 11th, the US has embarked on a policy of intervention in order to protect its and our future security. Hence Afghanistan. Hence Iraq. Hence the broader Middle East initiative in support of moves towards democracy in the Arab world.
The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually "regime change" it was "values change".

What we have done therefore in intervening in this way, is far more momentous than possibly we appreciated at the time.

Of course the fanatics, attached to a completely wrong and reactionary view of Islam, had been engaging in terrorism for years before September 11th. In Chechnya, in India and Pakistan, in Algeria, in many other Muslim countries, atrocities were occurring. But we did not feel the impact directly. So we were not bending our eye or our will to it as we should have. We had barely heard of the Taleban. We rather inclined to the view that where there was terrorism, perhaps it was partly the fault of the governments of the countries concerned.

We were in error. In fact, these acts of terrorism were not isolated incidents. They were part of a growing movement. A movement that believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this take-over, whereas the true way to recover not just the true faith, but Muslim confidence and self esteem, was to take on the West and all its works.

Sometimes political strategy comes deliberatively, sometimes by instinct. For this movement, it was probably by instinct. It has an ideology, a world-view, it has deep convictions and the determination of the fanatic. It resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism. It doesn't always need structures and command centres or even explicit communication. It knows what it thinks.

Its strategy in the late 1990s became clear. If they were merely fighting with Islam, they ran the risk that fellow Muslims - being as decent and fair-minded as anyone else - would choose to reject their fanaticism. A battle about Islam was just Muslim versus Muslim. They realised they had to create a completely different battle in Muslim minds: Muslim versus Western.

This is what September 11th did. Still now, I am amazed at how many people will say, in effect, there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that September 11th predated either. The West didn't attack this movement. We were attacked. Until then we had largely ignored it.

The reason I say our response was even more momentous than it seemed at the time, is this. We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn't. We chose values. We said we didn't want another Taleban or a different Saddam. Rightly, in my view, we realised that you can't defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas.

There is a host of analysis written about mistakes made in Iraq or Afghanistan, much of it with hindsight but some of it with justification. But it all misses one vital point. The moment we decided not to change regime but to change the value system, we made both Iraq and Afghanistan into existential battles for Reactionary Islam. We posed a threat not to their activities simply: but to their values, to the roots of their existence.

We committed ourselves to supporting Moderate, Mainstream Islam. In almost pristine form, the battles in Iraq or Afghanistan became battles between the majority of Muslims in either country who wanted democracy and the minority who realise that this rings the death-knell of their ideology.

What is more, in doing this, we widened the definition of Reactionary Islam. It is not just Al-Qaeda who felt threatened by the prospect of two brutal dictatorships - one secular, one religious - becoming tolerant democracies. Any other country who could see that change in those countries might result in change in theirs, immediately also felt under threat. Syria and Iran, for example. No matter that previously, in what was effectively another political age, many of those under threat hated each other. Suddenly new alliances became formed under the impulsion of the common threat.

So in Iraq, Syria allowed Al-Qaeda operatives to cross the border. Iran has supported extremist Shia there. The purpose of the terrorism in Iraq is absolutely
simple: carnage, causing sectarian hatred, leading to civil war.

However, there was one cause which, the world over, unites Islam, one issue that even the most westernised Muslims find unjust and, perhaps worse, humiliating: Palestine. Here a moderate leadership was squeezed between its own inability to control the radical elements and the political stagnation of the peace process. When Prime Minister Sharon took the brave step of disengagement from Gaza, it could have been and should have been the opportunity to re-start the process. But the squeeze was too great and as ever because these processes never stay still, instead of moving forward, it fell back. Hamas won the election. Even then, had moderate elements in Hamas been able to show progress, the situation might have been saved. But they couldn't.

So the opportunity passed to Reactionary Islam and they seized it: first in Gaza, then in Lebanon. They knew what would happen. Their terrorism would provoke massive retaliation by Israel. Within days, the world would forget the original provocation and be shocked by the retaliation. They want to trap the Moderates between support for America and an Arab street furious at what they see nightly on their television. This is what has happened.

For them, what is vital is that the struggle is defined in their terms: Islam versus the West; that instead of Muslims seeing this as about democracy versus dictatorship, they see only the bombs and the brutality of war, and sent from Israel.

In this way, they hope that the arc of extremism that now stretches across the region, will sweep away the fledgling but faltering steps Modern Islam wants to take into the future.

To turn all of this around requires us first to perceive the nature of the struggle we are fighting and secondly to have a realistic strategy to win it. At present we are challenged on both fronts.

As to the first, it is almost incredible to me that so much of Western opinion appears to buy the idea that the emergence of this global terrorism is somehow our fault. For a start, it is indeed global. No-one who ever half bothers to look at the spread and range of activity related to this terrorism can fail to see its presence in virtually every major nation in the world. It is directed at the United States and its allies, of course. But it is also directed at nations who could not conceivably be said to be allies of the West. It is also rubbish to suggest that it is the product of poverty. It is true it will use the cause of poverty. But its fanatics are hardly the champions of economic development. It is based on religious extremism. That is the fact. And not any religious extremism; but a specifically Muslim version.

What it is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about those countries' liberation from US occupation. It is actually the only reason for the continuing presence of our troops. And it is they not us who are doing the slaughter of the innocent and doing it deliberately.

Its purpose is explicitly to prevent those countries becoming democracies and not "Western style" democracies, any sort of democracy. It is to prevent Palestine living side by side with Israel; not to fight for the coming into being of a Palestinian State, but for the going out of being, of an Israeli State. It is not wanting Muslim countries to modernise but to retreat into governance by a semi-feudal religious oligarchy.

Yet despite all of this, which I consider virtually obvious, we look at the bloodshed in Iraq and say that's a reason for leaving; we listen to the propaganda that tells us its all because of our suppression of Muslims and have parts of our opinion seriously believing that if we only got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, it would all stop.

And most contemporaneously, and in some ways most perniciously, a very large and, I fear, growing part of our opinion looks at Israel, and thinks we pay too great a price for supporting it and sympathises with Muslim opinion that condemns it. Absent from so much of the coverage, is any understanding of the Israeli predicament.

I, and any halfway sentient human being, regards the loss of civilian life in Lebanon as unacceptable, grieves for that nation, is sickened by its plight and wants the war to stop now. But just for a moment, put yourself in Israel's place. It has a crisis in Gaza, sparked by the kidnap of a solider by Hamas. Suddenly, without warning, Hizbollah who have been continuing to operate in Southern Lebanon for two years in defiance of UN Resolution 1559, cross the UN blue line, kill eight Israeli soldiers and kidnap two more. They then fire rockets indiscriminately at the civilian population in Northern Israel.

Hizbollah gets their weapons from Iran. Iran are now also financing militant elements in Hamas. Iran's President has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". And he's trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. Just to complete the picture, Israel's main neighbour along its eastern flank is Syria who support Hizbollah and house the hardline leaders of Hamas.

It's not exactly a situation conducive to a feeling of security is it?

But the central point is this. In the end, even the issue of Israel is just part of the same, wider struggle for the soul of the region. If we recognised this struggle for what it truly is, we would be at least along the first steps of the path to winning it. But a vast part of the Western opinion is not remotely near this yet.

Whatever the outward manifestation at any one time - in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iraq and add to that in Afghanistan, in Kashmir, in a host of other nations including now some in Africa - it is a global fight about global values; it is about modernisation, within Islam and outside of it; it is about whether our value system can be shown to be sufficiently robust, true, principled and appealing that it beats theirs. Islamist extremism's whole strategy is based on a presumed sense of grievance that can motivate people to divide against each other. Our answer has to be a set of values strong enough to unite people with each other.

This is not just about security or military tactics. It is about hearts and minds about inspiring people, persuading them, showing them what our values at their best stand for.

Just to state it in these terms, is to underline how much we have to do. Convincing our own opinion of the nature of the battle is hard enough. But we then have to empower Moderate, Mainstream Islam to defeat Reactionary Islam. And because so much focus is now, world-wide on this issue, it is becoming itself a kind of surrogate for all the other issues the rest of the world has with the West. In other words, fail on this and across the range, everything gets harder.

Why are we not yet succeeding? Because we are not being bold enough, consistent enough, thorough enough, in fighting for the values we believe in.

We start this battle with some self-evident challenges. Iraq's political process has worked in an extraordinary way. But the continued sectarian bloodshed is appalling: and threatens its progress deeply. In Afghanistan, the Taleban are making a determined effort to return and using the drugs trade a front. Years of anti-Israeli and therefore anti-American teaching and propaganda has left the Arab street often wildly divorced from the practical politics of their governments. Iran and, to a lesser extent, Syria are a constant source of de-stabilisation and reaction. The purpose of terrorism - whether in Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon or Palestine is never just the terrorist act itself. It is to use the act to trigger a chain reaction, to expunge any willingness to negotiate or compromise. Unfortunately it frequently works, as we know from our own experience in Northern Ireland, though thankfully the huge progress made in the last decade there, shows that it can also be overcome.

So, short-term, we can't say we are winning. But, there are many reasons for long-term optimism. Across the Middle East, there is a process of modernisation as well as reaction. It is unnoticed but it is there: in the UAE; in Bahrain; in Kuwait; in Qatar. In Egypt, there is debate about the speed of change but not about its direction. In Libya and Algeria, there is both greater stability and a gradual but significant opening up.

Most of all, there is one incontrovertible truth that should give us hope. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, and of course in the Lebanon, any time that people are permitted a chance to embrace democracy, they do so. The lie - that democracy, the rule of law, human rights are Western concepts, alien to Islam - has been exposed. In countries as disparate as Turkey and Indonesia, there is an emerging strength in Moderate Islam that should greatly encourage us.

So the struggle is finely poised. The question is: how do we empower the moderates to defeat the extremists?

First, naturally, we should support, nurture, build strong alliances with all those in the Middle East who are on the modernising path.

Secondly, we need, as President Bush said on Friday, to re-energise the MEPP between Israel and Palestine; and we need to do it in a dramatic and profound manner.

I want to explain why I think this issue is so utterly fundamental to all we are trying to do. I know it can be very irritating for Israel to be told that this issue is of cardinal importance, as if it is on their shoulders that the weight of the troubles of the region should always fall. I know also their fear that in our anxiety for wider reasons to secure a settlement, we sacrifice the vital interests of Israel.

Let me make it clear. I would never put Israel's security at risk.

Instead I want, what we all now acknowledge we need: a two state solution. The Palestinian State must be independent, viable but also democratic and not threaten Israel's safety.

This is what the majority of Israelis and Palestinians want.

Its significance for the broader issue of the Middle East and for the battle within Islam, is this. The real impact of a settlement is more than correcting the plight of the Palestinians. It is that such a settlement would be the living, tangible, visible proof that the region and therefore the world can accommodate different faiths and cultures, even those who have been in vehement opposition to each other. It is, in other words, the total and complete rejection of the case of Reactionary Islam. It destroys not just their most effective rallying call, it fatally undermines their basic ideology.

And, for sure, it empowers Moderate, Mainstream Islam enormously. They are able to point to progress as demonstration that their allies, ie us, are even-handed not selective, do care about justice for Muslims as much as Christians or Jews.

But, and it is a big 'but', this progress will not happen unless we change radically our degree of focus, effort and engagement, especially with the Palestinian side. In this the active leadership of the US is essential but so also is the participation of Europe, of Russia and of the UN. We need relentlessly, vigorously, to put a viable Palestinian Government on its feet, to offer a vision of how the Roadmap to final status negotiation can happen and then pursue it, week in, week out, 'til its done. Nothing else will do. Nothing else is more important to the success of our foreign policy.

Third, we need to see Iraq through its crisis and out to the place its people want: a non-sectarian, democratic state. The Iraqi and Afghan fight for democracy is our fight. Same values. Same enemy. Victory for them is victory for us all.

Fourth, we need to make clear to Syria and Iran that there is a choice: come in to the international community and play by the same rules as the rest of us; or be confronted. Their support of terrorism, their deliberate export of instability, their desire to see wrecked the democratic prospect in Iraq, is utterly unjustifiable, dangerous and wrong. If they keep raising the stakes, they will find they have miscalculated.

From the above it is clear that from now on, we need a whole strategy for the Middle East. If we are faced with an arc of extremism, we need a corresponding arc of moderation and reconciliation. Each part is linked. Progress between Israel and Palestine affects Iraq. Progress in Iraq affects democracy in the region. Progress for Moderate, Mainstream Islam anywhere puts Reactionary Islam on the defensive everywhere. But none of it happens unless in each individual part the necessary energy and commitment is displayed not fitfully, but continuously.

I said at the outset that the result of this struggle had effects wider than the region itself. Plainly that applies to our own security. This Global Islamist terrorism began in the Middle East. Sort the Middle East and it will inexorably decline. The read-across, for example, from the region to the Muslim communities in Europe is almost instant.

But there is a less obvious sense in which the outcome determines the success of our wider world-view. For me, a victory for the moderates means an Islam that is open: open to globalisation, open to working with others of different faiths, open to alliances with other nations.

In this way, this struggle is in fact part of a far wider debate.

Though Left and Right still matter in politics, the increasing divide today is between open and closed. Is the answer to globalisation, protectionism or free trade?

Is the answer to the pressure of mass migration, managed immigration or closed borders?

Is the answer to global security threats, isolationism or engagement?

Those are very big questions for US and for Europe.

Without hesitation, I am on the open side of the argument. The way for us to handle the challenge of globalisation, is to compete better, more intelligently, more flexibly. We have to give our people confidence we can compete. See competition as a threat and we are already on the way to losing.

Immigration is the toughest issue in Europe right now and you know something of it here in California. People get scared of it for understandable reasons. It needs to be controlled. There have to be rules. Many of the Conventions dealing with it post WWII are out of date. All that is true. But, properly managed, immigrants give a country dynamism, drive, new ideas as well as new blood.

And as for isolationism, that is a perennial risk in the US and EU policy. My point here is very simple: global terrorism means we can't opt-out even if we wanted to. The world is inter-dependent. To be engaged is only modern realpolitik.

But we only win people to these positions if our policy is not just about interests but about values, not just about what is necessary but about what is right.

Which brings me to my final reflection about US policy. My advice is: always be in the lead, always at the forefront, always engaged in building alliances, in reaching out, in showing that whereas unilateral action can never be ruled out, it is not the preference.

How we get a sensible, balanced but effective framework to tackle climate change after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 should be an American priority.

America wants a low-carbon economy; it is investing heavily in clean technology; it needs China and India to grow substantially. The world is ready for a new start here. Lead it.

The same is true for the WTO talks, now precariously in the balance; or for Africa, whose poverty is shameful.

If we are championing the cause of development in Africa, it is right in itself but it is also sending the message of moral purpose, that reinforces our value system as credible in all other aspects of policy.

It serves one other objective. There is a risk that the world, after the Cold War, goes back to a global policy based on spheres of influence. Think ahead. Think China, within 20 or 30 years, surely the world's other super-power. Think Russia and its precious energy reserves. Think India. I believe all of these great emerging powers want a benign relationship with the West. But I also believe that the stronger and more appealing our world-view is, the more it is seen as based not just on power but on justice, the easier it will be for us to shape the future in which Europe and the US will no longer, economically or politically, be transcendant. Long before then, we want Moderate, Mainstream Islam to triumph over Reactionary Islam.

That is why I say this struggle is one about values. Our values are worth struggling for. They represent humanity's progress throughout the ages and at each point we have had to fight for them and defend them. As a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again.

Read the Q and A Question:

Mr Prime Minister, can Britain take the lead in speaking to Iran and Syria directly?

Prime Minister:

You know the thing that always surprises me about this is that people talk about this issue of engagement with Iran and Syria as if there was some doubt about what we were saying, or where we stood, or maybe the message hadn't been clear enough. Actually the message is absolutely clear, the message is if you stop supporting terrorism, if you stop trying to acquire nuclear weapons and breach your international obligations then we are willing to have a partnership with you, but if you export terrorism around the region and destabilise democracy in Iraq, we will confront you. Now I know there are all sorts of people who engage, and of course we do, we send messages the whole time to both governments, but I am afraid I have come to the conclusion that this is not an issue of communication, it is not that people can't read our handwriting, it is actually that they lack the will to do what they need to do and we need to make sure they have that will.

Question:

What is the United Nations capable of, and what is it not? Can all it do is pass meaningless resolutions?

Prime Minister:

Actually I would say to you that I think the United Nations can, in certain circumstances, be absolutely essential to solving the world's problems, and there are situations that have arisen in which the United
Nations has come together and made a real difference, and indeed some of the things that we were talking about earlier in relation to some of the disputes in Africa and so on indicate that very, very clearly too. But there are two things that need to happen. The first is that we need to reform the institutions of the United Nations thoroughly because they are not as they should be; and the second thing is you can make any amount of institutional change, but the key thing is whether there is the right political alliance at the heart of the Security Council of the United Nations.

Now I think there is a case incidentally for broadening the Security Council and I favour that, but in a way whatever institutional framework you have, the basic point is we have to have political agreement between the leading powers. And that is why I say in particular I think the transatlantic alliance is really, really important. Europe and America, whatever their differences from time to time, they have the values system in common and they should be proud of their alliance and we should make sure that we use that as a basis for trying to engineer the right type of political alliance within the UN Security Council. So look, if the UN didn't exist we would be inventing it, that is for sure, at least some people would, but I think it could be so much more effective but it needs reform, it needs leadership and it needs the right political alliance to motivate it.

Question:

In what ways does our passion for western democracy get in the way of resolving global or regional conflicts?

Prime Minister:

Well that is a very interesting question and a very good question. You see I have come to the conclusion, and I really confess to you I have changed my view of this, that actually there are no stable relationships in the long term unless there is progress towards democracy and freedom, that in other words the idea that countries that are governed by either secular or religious dictatorships provide a solid basis for progress, I think is just wrong. And the interesting thing about Iraq and Afghanistan, and this was the fascinating thing, is that so many people told us that you just don't understand it, people in Iraq aren't interested in democracy. The turnout in Iraq, despite people being threatened and in some cases killed on the way to the polls, was higher than the last Presidential election or the last general election in Britain. So people do care about this and democracies by and large don't fight each other. So I actually think in the end, yes, short term sometimes the passion for democracy can be difficult because there are so many vested interests that don't want it. Long term I have come to the conclusion that actually it is only through the spread of liberty, and democracy, and the rule of law and basic respect for human rights that we will get peace and security.

Question:

Should NATO be used in Lebanon, as it is in Afghanistan and Bosnia?

Prime Minister:

I think it depends on what is most helpful for the situation there, because we will need both the support of the government of Israel and the government of Lebanon for the force to operate. And I think at this point in time it is not possible to be clear about it, although I would say to you that the majority of people probably would say that NATO shouldn't be involved. But whatever force is involved it has to have the capacity of making sure that the original reason for the conflict, which were the activities in breach of the United Nations resolutions down in the south of Lebanon by Hezbollah are curtailed, because unless the government of Lebanon is given proper authority over the whole of Lebanon this will erupt again. And in my view the purpose of any multi-national force has got to be able to provide a bridge between the position for the government of Lebanon now, and the position we need to get to, which is not a permanent multinational force on the ground, but is a Lebanese democracy that is capable of having its writ run in every single part of the country without armed militias taking over parts of the country and running them in the way that they want.

And that is why in Lebanon what is important is to support Lebanese democracy. They have done amazing things in that country, it is why it is so tragic what has been brought about, but the only way, whether it is NATO or anybody else, we are going to get an effective multinational force there is if it has at its heart one principle, which is that our purpose is to make sure that when the Lebanese people vote in their government in a democracy, they do so without outside interference from Syria or anyone else, and without inside interference by well armed militia.

Question:

To many Americans there seems to be a latent and growing anti-Semitism in Europe. How can this be stopped?

Prime Minister:

I think that there are really two parts to this. I think there are people who are anti-Semitic in Europe and there has been a growing rise of anti-Semitic attacks which are appalling and terrible in different parts of Europe. But I think there is another strain of opinion, and this is the reason I devoted some of my speech to doing this, that just doesn't see it from Israel's point of view at all, I mean just doesn't understand what it is like to be a country surrounded by a lot of people who basically want to deny your right to exist, and in a way I think that is part of the problem. And I also think it then gets run in with the issue to do with anti-Americanism because of America's support for Israel. And again I said this in a speech I made a couple of months ago, the only way you ever confront this is confronting the basic ideas.

What I said in that speech, let me try and explain this, a lot of what happens in the western debate, in the European debate very specifically, but also in other countries too, less so in America but still in parts I guess in the American system, is that everybody abhors the terrorist method, people don't get up and support terrorism but they kind of buy half way into some of the ideas that they are putting forward in the sense that they say yes well you do have a real sense of grievance against America and its allies, but you shouldn't blow people up in pursuit of it. And my point the whole way through is we are never going to defeat this until we say actually that is wrong, you have no sense of grievance.

In Afghanistan and Iraq we have billions of dollars waiting there to help reconstruct the country, the country is a democracy, where is the suppression? You know the Taliban down in the south where British troops have gone in to try and clear out the Taliban, they have literally taken teachers out in front of their class and executed them in front of class for teaching girls. Now where should the sense of grievance be - against us who have actually helped those countries and those people get democracy for the first time, or these absolutely brutal murderous terrorists who want to send them back into some sort of feudal time?

In other words unless we are prepared to stand up and say, 'No actually what you think about America is nonsense', I mean I said this to some people the other day and it was difficult, but you have got to say it. I said look, as far as I am aware people in America are free to practise their religion as Muslims, and they certainly are in Britain, what is the sense of grievance?

Now we may disagree about this or that aspect of foreign policy, but that is not the same as saying that our purpose in going to Iraq and Afghanistan was something to do with the fact that those countries were Muslim, it was to do with the fact that they were threatening our security. That is where this is difficult.

So the answer to your question is yes, there are real worries about anti-Semitism, but I think that the problem is slightly different from that, if I am frank about it, it is that there is a world view there that is very, very, well I would call it somewhat soggy and unable just to see the realities of what is happening. And that is what you have to confront, not just the activities of the terrorists, but their ideas, because far too many of their ideas have some purchase on opinion in the western world.

Question:

Will you continue your government's leadership on global climate change now that you are no longer President of the G8?

Prime Minister:

I think, as I was saying yesterday with Governor Schwarzenegger - it is great to be with him. I phoned my wife up and she said to me: "How do you feel being with Arnie Schwarzenegger?" I said: "Actually I felt acute body envy really." But anyway we were discussing climate change. The important thing is this. I actually think that there is a real chance for America to take leadership in this area because President Bush made his State of the Union address, talking about the need for America to move to a low carbon economy, we established at the G8 last year a G8+5 dialogue, that is the G8 countries plus Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and of course India and China, and the purpose of it was to try to get the main countries together.

When we look at what is going to succeed Kyoto, instead of trying to get 150 countries, or however many it is, round the table and negotiate something, get the main people together, let's work out a framework but the framework has to include not just America, but China and India on the other side. And we should work out how we manage to get the right binding framework in place with the right targets that allow our economies to grow, and this was the importance of yesterday's meeting, we had a wide range of business leaders there.

What business wants to know is the direction of policy, it wants some regulatory certainty, it wants to know that if we are going to make the investment in the research and the development which is necessary for the science and technology to work, you know they are not suddenly going to find policies move in a different direction.

And I think this is the time for us to work now on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, make sure it has all the main players in it, and I think it is a fantastic thing if there are places in the United States that are showing leadership now on this issue because it hugely empowers and emboldens the rest of us. And I want to see this issue back on the agenda for the German G8 next year, I think that will happen, and I do honestly believe that the evidence of climate change is clear and this is a major, major subject for us.

Question:

This gentleman says he is a Los Angeles County fire fighter who responded to the 9/11 disaster in New York, and he would like to know how the events of 9/11 changed you personally?

Prime Minister:

Well first of all I would like to pay tribute to the fire-fighters from Los Angeles, from New York, from elsewhere who did such a fantastic job, and the public servants everywhere. It did change me personally because some of the things that I have said tonight I can trace back to the speech I made actually in Chicago in 1999 at the time of the Kosovo crisis. But I think what September 11 did for me, quite apart from everything else obviously, the emotional impact such a terrible thing makes, it showed me that the world is genuinely interdependent. I always believed that it was not just an attack on America but it was an attack on America because America was the most powerful country espousing our values and therefore it was an attack on all of us. And I from that moment became determined that we should do everything we could, not just to defeat those that had committed such murder and slaughter of innocent people, but to make sure that in every single part of the world, given its interdependence, we should give people the chance of hope and prosperity and that we should never believe that people languishing in poverty or under extremist governments were not our responsibility.

And one of the things that I find most difficult about politics is that everything really works through the media today, which is the way it is, but sometimes I get frustrated when you can call any numbers of people on to the street to protest against say military action in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever it might be, or against what Israel is doing in Lebanon. There are no demonstrations about North Korea, there is not a placard there, not as far as I know, maybe there is here but not that I have ever seen, and these people live in complete and total enslavement, and I think our job has got to be, if the world is interdependent, that is something we can't help. We can't help globalisation, globalisation is a fact, but the values that govern globalisation are a choice and our choice should be, and this is what came home to me as well as everything else after September 11, our choice has got to be the values of liberty, and tolerance and justice, it has got to be a world that is free but also a world that is fair, and that is what I decided after that time to dedicate our foreign policy to trying to do.

    Speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, 1 August 2006, 10 Downing Street, http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page9948.asp

Questions asked about the performance of Beckett

· Foreign secretary too inexperienced, say critics
· Knowledge of Middle East affairs causes concern

Tuesday August 1, 2006
Guardian
Ewen MacAskill and Will Woodward

The grumblings within the Foreign Office are getting louder. Officials complain the Israel-Lebanon war has brutally exposed the inexperience and inadequacies of Margaret Beckett as foreign secretary.

Since unexpectedly being given the job on May 5, she has, critics say, been near-invisible. The Foreign Office has proposed to her making trips, speeches and interviews to raise her profile, almost all of which she has rejected.

"She should have, and could have, taken that advice. She is too nervous, too inexperienced: it is not her style," a former minister said. "It is difficult to pile into a job if you have not shown any interest in foreign affairs before. She is a safe pair of hands but the foreign secretary has to be more than that. It is not a good appointment."

A small but significant sign of discontent are the whispers of complaint about her husband, Leo, constantly hanging round her office. As her spouse, he is entitled to travel with her, as he did to Brazil, but the diplomats are irritated by his frequent presence in the Foreign Office.

When the prime minister offered her the job, she recalled later, her answer was "one word, and four-lettered". She earned a reputation as a tough negotiator across Whitehall, and in Brussels where she took on European governments in her old environment post. But foreign affairs has never been one of her interests and to some observers the war has exposed her lack of background.

Keith Simpson, the Conservatives' Middle East spokesman, used a cricket analogy. "She's very cautious, on the whole a defensive batsman. She slows everything down in debates." This style - excellent for handling the Commons and her own party - had been less successful in her new post, Mr Simpson said.

"She looks very tired, and very anxious, at the moment she's not up to speed. She's in at the deep end and she realises that all the big decisions are being made by Blair, and her political antennae tell her that the policy she is defending is unpopular with the vast bulk of the Labour party."

Her position was not helped at the weekend when her predecessor, Jack Straw, said the Israeli response had been "disproportionate".

Since the crisis blew up, Mrs Beckett has shunned the kind of shuttle diplomacy that her predecessors, Robin Cook and Mr Straw, engaged in. Both men were familiar with and had contacts in most of the Middle East capitals. In radio and television interviews, she has come across as tetchy, uncertain and uneasy in defending the agreed line of opposition to an immediate ceasefire.

It is remarkable, even without the war, that the new foreign secretary has not visited the Middle East, the centre of so many of the key foreign policy issues of the day, from the plight of the Palestinians to the near-civil war in Iraq. Instead, she has made a trip to Brazil, to New York for a summit on Iran, to Paris on the same issue, and to various European foreign ministers' meetings.

A senior European official who met her soon after her appointment was unimpressed not only with her lack of knowledge about the Middle East but foreign affairs generally. "Frankly, there certainly was a need for a little homework," he said.

Tony Blair has increasingly come to dominate foreign policy, but Mr Cook, with his ethical foreign policy, and Mr Straw, with his policy of engagement with Iran, had an independence that Mrs Beckett has yet to demonstrate. A Labour MP with a close interest in the Foreign Office dismissed her as "assistant secretary for foreign affairs to the prime minister".

Mr Blair ignored Foreign Office advice in the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 and he is ignoring it again on the Lebanon crisis. The senior European official said: "Her role is very difficult. It is a matter that has been taken directly by Blair. She has no background in this. I think Straw would have made a difference."

Mr Straw's strength was that he cultivated good relations with Iran in an attempt to avoid conflict on the nuclear issue. That remains one of Britain's diplomatic strengths: the US has no embassy in Tehran but Britain does and Mrs Beckett could go to Iran for talks, an option denied to Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state. Britain also has a marginally better relationship with Syria than the US, which withdrew its ambassador last year.

A Foreign Office spokesman defended her yesterday, saying she had made nine to 12 phone calls over the weekend on the Lebanon issue. "She has been directing things back here," he said. "She is doing a lot of coordinating with other foreign ministers. She made a decision to send Kim Howells out to the region and just decided to stay back in London, particularly with the prime minister going to Washington and working the phones and overseeing strategy back here."

She is scheduled to attend a meeting of European foreign ministers today and may go to the United Nations security council later this week if the ambassadors there decide a resolution on Lebanon requires the presence of foreign ministers.

Her testy interviews on Radio 4 and Sky are a contrast with the sure-footedness she has shown in the past as a "Minister for the Today programme", one of those chosen by No 10 to defend the government in crises. Yesterday, when she told that programme "we can't afford for Israel to stop listening", she sounded rattled and tired, not for the first time, though few would show supreme poise at 7.10am.

One MP reckoned that at the age of 63, after nine years in government and 22 on the frontbench, this was simply a post too far. "It's a shattering job, I would have myself put a younger person in there," he said.

David Miliband, who took her job at environment instead, was considered for the Foreign Office but Mr Blair - perhaps mindful of the parallels with James Callaghan's appointment of a youthful David Owen - flinched.

Some MPs believe that media criticism should be better directed at her boss and that the failings in her position are those of Mr Blair.

"I'm very pleased I don't have to be on the radio and television at the moment defending their position, even though I broadly agree with it," admitted one former minister.

    Questions asked about the performance of Beckett, G, 1.8.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1834697,00.html

1.15pm

Abandon your Lebanon policy, former Foreign Office spokesman tells Blair

Tuesday August 1, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Matthew Tempest, political correspondent

The former chief spokesman for the Foreign Office has called on Tony Blair to abandon his current policy on Lebanon and head an EU-led peace conference on the crisis.

John Williams, who was spokesman for the past three foreign secretaries, said the prime minister now needed to salvage his reputation by resurrecting the Anglo-French-German axis which had negotiated with Iran to deal with the war in Southern Lebanon.

And he suggests that with foreign policy being made in Downing Street, Margaret Beckett, the current foreign secretary, is little more than a "frustrated bystander".

Mr Williams, chief spokesman for the FCO until this summer, writes today that Mr Blair must bluntly tell George Bush and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert that their "strategy has failed".

Instead, the PM should use his "credit" in Washington and "high repute" in Tel Aviv to organise a peace conference brokered by the British, French and German foreign ministers.

The intervention from Mr Williams comes as a 35,000-strong petition was handed in to Downing Street demanding Mr Blair call for an immediate ceasefire in the region.

Martin Bell, the former war reporter and independent MP, handed in the petition, which was backed by a plethora of aid agencies and the Muslim Council of Britain.

Writing on the Guardian's website today, Mr Williams - who served under Robin Cook, Jack Straw and Margaret Becket - explicitly calls the crisis "a terrible failure for president Bush's championing of Middle East democracy".

He adds: "It's easy for me to write that, now that I am no longer a government spokesman. I'm not going to criticise friends and former colleagues for not describing the situation as harshly as a commentator can. But Tony Blair should now use his credit in Washington and Israel to persuade President Bush and prime minister Olmert that their strategy has failed, and must be abandoned.

"If Tony Blair did that, he could repair some of the collateral damage done to his reputation in the last three weeks."

The former voice of the Foreign Office added that it was "hard to see American diplomacy doing what is necessary while President Bush remains in office".

"Britain should therefore take the lead, as we have in the nuclear negotiations with Iran. I'd like to see the prime minister using his leverage to get US support for a mission by Margaret Beckett and her French and German counterparts to Israel and Palestine. If Arab states - and Russia - took part, all the better.

"Olmert and [Mahmood] Abbas were quite close to agreeing terms for a summit when this crisis erupted. The European Three should be mandated by the Security Council to get them to the table and keep them there. Tony Blair could open the conference, using his high repute in Israel to give prime minister Olmert the political cover he needs for a return to diplomacy.

"Meanwhile Hilary Benn should be asked to organise a Europe-led reconstruction effort in Lebanon.

Tellingly, he adds: "I'm sure that both he and the foreign secretary would rather be given these challenges than remain frustrated bystanders."

Mrs Beckett herself is in Brussels today for a meeting of foreign ministers - with the UK still isolated in Europe in resisting a call for an immediate international ceasefire.

On the agenda is the idea - promoted by Mr Blair but so far delayed by the UN - of an international stabilisation force, amid signs that member states are reluctant to sign up in the current climate.

While the Irish government indicated that it would send 200 troops to the region if the climate was right, the Italians warned that rounding up enough troops was going to be difficult.

The Italian foreign minister Massimo d'Alema said bluntly: "In a climate like this, nobody would send their own soldiers."

With the PM enroute from California to his summer holiday, campaigners at Number 10 accused Mr Blair of not doing enough to exert pressure on the US president as they handed in the petition.

Aid agencies handing in the petition were joined by former Mr Bell and Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

They carried a 6ft x 4ft gravestone-shaped placard from Parliament Square to Downing Street bearing the message: "Ceasefire Now."

Smaller similar gravestone placards bearing some of the names of the signatories were handed in with the petition. Today's petition was backed by agencies including Save the Children, Christian Aid, CARE International and Oxfam.

Mr Bell said: "These are all the main charities and aid agencies which work in Lebanon and there is a humanitarian crisis.

"They cannot help the people while the fighting continues."

He added that there was "huge dissatisfaction" among backbench Labour MPs about the prime minister's failure to demand an immediate ceasefire.

Amelia Bookstein of Save the Children said: "It is very clear from a humanitarian point of view that children are bearing the brunt of this crisis."

She said that about 45% of those being killed were children and better protection for civilians was desperately needed.

Despite the dangers of aid convoys being bombed, relief agencies were still carrying out their work in the region, she said.

But she added: "We cannot scale up to the size we need without a ceasefire."

She said: "Innocent children are being killed daily in a war they had no part or place in."

Mr Bell added: "These tens of thousands of signatures gathered in just a few days show how strongly the public feel - the Government would do well to heed them."

The petition was gathered after adverts were placed in three national newspapers four days ago.

An ICM poll last week showed most voters believed Israel had gone too far with its military action in Lebanon.

Just 22% believed Israel's response had been proportionate, 61% believing that the country overreacted to the threat facing it.

    Abandon your Lebanon policy, former Foreign Office spokesman tells Blair, G, 1.8.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1834931,00.html

Blair hardens line on Israel after cabinet criticism

Monday July 31, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour in San Francisco and Tania Branigan

Tony Blair yesterday responded to a growing backbench and cabinet revolt over his handling of the Middle East crisis by saying the Qana bombing showed that a peace agreement must be reached.

Mr Blair has been under mounting internal criticism for refusing to endorse calls for an immediate unconditional ceasefire or to condemn the Israeli bombing as disproportionate.

He has instead focused on securing a UN resolution to deploy a multinational force in southern Lebanon.

"What happened at Qana shows this situation simply cannot continue," he said last night. "This is an absolutely tragic situation, but we have got to make sure the discussions we are having and the negotiations we are conducting does lead to a genuine cessation of hostilities."

Downing Street slapped down the former foreign secretary Jack Straw, who at the weekend condemned Israeli action as disproportionate and likely to undermine support across the Middle East.

Mr Blair's spokesman denied a cabinet revolt over his handling of the issue, although cabinet sources said there was widespread concern that the prime minister's position leaves the government open to the charge that it is indifferent to the suffering of the Lebanese people.

Some cabinet members pointed out that Mr Straw, the leader of the house, had not voiced concerns in last week's cabinet meeting.

The leading figure to express concern at the Israeli action was David Miliband, the environment, food and rural affairs secretary. Allies of Mr Straw, who is now on holiday, insisted he made every effort to quote accurately the words of the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells who visited the region recently.

Speaking during a round of interviews in the US, Mr Blair told Channel 5: "There was a perfectly good discussion at the cabinet actually and it certainly wasn't a divisive discussion at all. Of course what they were saying is 'let us make sure with urgency we can stop a situation that's killing innocent people'."

Mr Blair was expected to reassert robustly his view that the "underlying cause" of the conflict - Islamic terrorism - must be addressed when he made a speech to executives from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp organisation in California last night.

The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said the government was "united" around the goal of ending the conflict.

"I'm a little bit sorry to see some of the reports that suggest there is a lot of division in cabinet. There is not division. There's not a single person in the cabinet who is not desperately anxious about the situation, isn't really worried and concerned and wanting to do everything we can to bring it to an end, and agonising over whether we are in fact doing everything we can and how can we do more."

Asked on the Sky News Adam Boulton programme what she disagreed with in Mr Straw's statement, she said: "I don't use the words Jack used about a number of things, for precisely the reason that I sometimes think it hinders understanding rather than supporting it."

She insisted the UK had "repeatedly urged on the Israelis to act proportionately".

Mr Straw's statement said: "Disproportionate action only escalates an already dangerous situation. One of many serious concerns I have is that the continuation of such tactics by Israel could further destabilise the already fragile Lebanese nation." He said Israel had the right to defend itself "proportionately", and expressed sympathy for their victims of the conflict. But he also "grieved" for the "10 times as many" Lebanese civilians killed or injured.

It is understood the statement was not cleared with Downing Street, although Mr Blair was aware what he intended to say.

Several hundred protesters, some carrying banners calling for "Freedom for Palestine and Lebanon", gathered in Trafalgar Square, London, yesterday. Comedian Alexei Sayle - who with other entertainers read poems and told stories of travels to Lebanon, said: "While Israel has all the privileges of a state it behaves worse than a terrorist organisation."

    Blair hardens line on Israel after cabinet criticism, G, 31.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1833961,00.html

Cabinet in open revolt over Blair's Israel policy

· Straw joins criticism of Lebanese toll
· Rice in Jerusalem to push peace plan

Sunday July 30, 2006
The Observer
Gaby Hinsliff in San Francisco, Ned Temko in London and Peter Beaumont in Beirut

Tony Blair was facing a full-scale cabinet rebellion last night over the Middle East crisis after his former Foreign Secretary warned that Israel's actions risked destabilising all of Lebanon.

Jack Straw, now Leader of the Commons, said in a statement released after meeting Muslim residents of his Blackburn constituency that while he grieved for the innocent Israelis killed, he also mourned the '10 times as many innocent Lebanese men, women and children killed by Israeli fire'.

He said he agreed with the Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells that it was 'very difficult to understand the kind of military tactics used by Israel', adding: 'These are not surgical strikes but have instead caused death and misery amongst innocent civilians.' Straw said he was worried that 'a continuation of such tactics by Israel could destabilise the already fragile Lebanese nation'.

The Observer can also reveal that at a cabinet meeting before Blair left for last Friday's Washington summit with President George Bush, minister after minister pressed him to break with the Americans and publicly criticise Israel over the scale of death and destruction.

The critics included close Blair allies. One, the International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, was revealed yesterday to have told a Commons committee that he did not view Israel's strikes on power stations as a 'proportionate response' to Hizbollah attacks.

Another Blairite minister among the cabinet critics said: 'It was clear that Tony knows the situation, and didn't have to be told about the outrage felt by so many over the disproportionate suffering. He also completely understands the effect on the Muslim community - both in terms of losing Muslim voters hand over fist and the wider issue of community cohesion.'

Blair responded to the dissenters by 'engaging seriously', the minister said. 'But he made it clear why he felt he had to choose the high-risk strategy of trying to move things forward for the future of the Middle East through his talks in Washington.'

In addition to the cabinet critics, one of Blair's closest Labour confidants was understood to have urged him last week to 'place distance' between himself and Bush over the crisis.

In interviews last night in San Francisco, the Prime Minister defended his decision not to call for an immediate ceasefire, but voiced the hope that an agreement on a UN framework for ending hostilities could be reached within a period of days. Asked by Sky News if he was too close to the White House, he said: 'I will never apologise for Britain being a strong ally of the US.'

He said there had been 'perfectly good' cabinet discussions on Lebanon, telling the BBC they had not been divisive: 'What they were saying was: "Let us make sure with urgency we can stop this situation which is killing innocent people".' Yet there had to be a long-term solution, he said.

The increase in political pressure came as shifts by Israel and Hizbollah provided the first faint signs of encouragement for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to sell a Blair-Bush plan for a ceasefire.

Diplomats said her mission would still be difficult, with Israeli strikes continuing in a bid to end rocket attacks by Hizbollah and the militia vowing to increase them. But as Rice arrived in Jerusalem last night, an Israeli official said his government would no longer insist on immediate disarmament by the militia as part of a deal. The Israelis would accept an interim arrangement under which an international force moved it back from the border and prevented it firing into Israel. Hizbollah has accepted a Lebanese government proposal including an international force.

Rice was due to meet the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, last night and, after further meetings in Jerusalem, to travel on to Beirut.

Straw's decision to go public with his concerns deepened the rift between the Prime Minister and his cabinet and MPs in what threatens to become his biggest foreign policy crisis since the Iraq war.

It also puts Straw's successor, Margaret Beckett, on the spot. She was planning to go on holiday this week, but may now have to go to New York to help pilot the draft UN resolution. Eyebrows in Whitehall were raised last week when she sent Howells to Beirut and Tel Aviv at the height of the conflict.

The timing of the revolt is awkward for Blair, forcing him to choose whom to upset: his colleagues back home or his two main hosts on the five-day trip to the US. President Bush and Rupert Murdoch both back the Israeli military action. The Prime Minister is due to make a major speech in California today at a conference hosted by Murdoch. He is expected to argue that his Washington talks with Bush were geared towards an 'urgent cessation of hostilities'.

He will also suggest the conflict could have been avoided. Instead, he will argue, the world turned a blind eye to Lebanon as Hizbollah built up its arsenals in breach of a UN resolution that required it to be disarmed and the Lebanese army to be deployed in the border area.

Blair won a concession in the Washington talks - an apology from President Bush for having failed to ask permission for a plane carrying bombs bound for Israel to land at Prestwick airport, near Glasgow. But yesterday, the civil aviation authorities announced that permission had been granted for two similar refuelling stops by US aircraft carrying 'hazardous' cargo to Israel.

    Cabinet in open revolt over Blair's Israel policy, O, 30.7.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833538,00.html

Bush and Blair lay out Lebanon plan but warn Tehran

· Timetable 'could lead to ceasefire by next week'
· Iran nuclear plan will lead to 'confrontation' - Blair

Saturday July 29, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger in Washington and Ewen MacAskill

Tony Blair and George Bush delivered yesterday their sharpest warning yet to Iran over its involvement in Lebanon and its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

As they set out a vague plan for bringing a cessation of violence in the Israel-Lebanon conflict at a joint press conference in the White House, they repeatedly referred to the threat posed by Iran and Syria, and their links with Hizbullah.

Mr Blair said events such as the conflict in Lebanon underscored the "simple choice" faced by Iran and Syria. "They can either come in and participate as proper and responsible members of the international community, or they will face the risk of increasing confrontation," he said.

Tehran, and to a lesser extent Syria, are alleged to have supplied weapons and money to Hizbullah and are due next month to deliver a response to a UN security council demand over their alleged ambition to secure a nuclear weapons capability. Mr Blair said Iran and Syria were making a "strategic miscalculation" if they thought the US and UK would be "indifferent" to their actions because of the pressure of events.

Speaking of their plan for a peace deal in Lebanon, Mr Blair and Mr Bush set out a timetable that the prime minister said could lead to a ceasefire by next week. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is to return to the Middle East today to present the plan to Israel and Lebanon.

Her aim is to tempt Israel with a pledge to install the Lebanese army, backed by an international force, in southern Lebanon to stop Hizbullah rocket attacks and to tempt Hizbullah with the return of the disputed Sheba'a Farms area. Hizbullah will not have to disarm immediately.

The details of who will join the international force will be discussed at the UN on Monday.

Mr Bush and Mr Blair have been resisting calls for an immediate ceasefire in every international forum for the past fortnight. This has been seen by their critics in Europe and the Middle East as an implicit green light to Israel to carry on its military offensive against Hizbullah.

The Foreign Office has been pressing Mr Blair for days to adopt a more critical policy towards the Israel even if it meant a rift with Mr Bush, but he ignored the civil servants' pleas. Some cabinet members fear Mr Blair, with his references to the "arc of extremism", is misreading the crisis as the next phase in the war between terrorism and democracy across the Middle East.

Although there was no change in policy, Mr Blair's tone changed, emphasising the suffering in Lebanon in a way he had not before.

By calling for a meeting on Monday on the creation of an international stabilisation force, before a ceasefire resolution is passed, Washington and London hope to put pressure on other world leaders to back their calls for a ceasefire.

Among the possible troop contributors being discussed are Turkey, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, Brazil and Greece. But British and US officials hope to exert maximum pressure on France, which has historical ties with Lebanon and forces capable of rapid deployment.

If a multinational force is agreed, British officials have said they envisage its deployment in two phases: an initial small force on the border almost immediately after a ceasefire is agreed, and a bigger body of between 10,000 and 20,000 troops that would, as Mr Blair put it, allow Lebanese forces into the south, which has long been a Hizbullah fiefdom.

US officials privately shrugged at the suggestion, eagerly promoted by their British counterparts, that Mr Blair's visit had accelerated movement towards a ceasefire. A source in the White House described the notion as something that had been "cooked up" for political ends, and Mr Bush appeared to refer to it at yesterday's joint press conference when he said: "We share the same urgency of trying to stop the violence."

The US believes significant damage has been inflicted on Hizbullah and that prolonging the war would enhance the Shia group's standing in the Islamic world more than it hurt its capacity to fight.

Meanwhile, Israel said it killed 26 Hizbullah fighters near the town of Bint Jbail, while Hizbullah launched a new rocket, the Khaibar-1, at the northern Israeli town of Afula, in its deepest strike yet.

    Bush and Blair lay out Lebanon plan but warn Tehran, G, 29.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1832856,00.html

Peter Brookes        The Times        July 28, 2006

Man: UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Britain lets more US arms flights land in Scotland

July 28, 2006
The Times
By Philip Webster, Political Editor

THE Government will allow more American aircraft carrying arms to Israel to stop over in Britain despite private concerns that the Pentagon was “playing fast and loose”.

The US has asked the Government to let two aircraft with missiles and bombs on board stop at Prestwick in the next fortnight. However, Labour MPs are furious with the US for breaking the rules governing the use of British airports as staging posts when demands on Israel for a ceasefire in Lebanon are growing stronger.

The Times has been told that two aircraft that landed at Prestwick last weekend carrying “bunker-busting” bombs had been designated as civilian flights and that the US failed to notify authorities in advance of their hazardous cargoes, as the rules demand.

The GBU28 bombs contain 630lbs (285kg) of high explosives and were developed by the US for use in the first Gulf War. The first foreign sale of the GBU28 was the acquisition of 100 units by Israel, authorised in April last year.

The munitions are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale approved by the US that Israel is able to draw at will. Last week Israel asked the US to deliver satellite and laser-guided bombs. This was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets to strike in Lebanon.

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, has complained to the White House about the issue and No 10 said yesterday that she had every right to be angry.

But, in an attempt to play down the row before today’s Washington summit on Lebanon between Tony Blair and President Bush, Britain is making plain that the dispute is about procedures and not the principle of allowing the aircraft to stop over.

“That will be allowed to continue. It is a right we have always granted,” a senior government official said. Both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Downing Street suggested that two more requests by America to send planes carrying missiles as well as components over the next fortnight will go through.

It is thought Mr Blair will not raise the issue because the White House is seemingly aware of British feelings. However, he is unlikely to be able to avoid it at his later press conference.

Mr Blair, under renewed and persistent attack at home for backing the US’s refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, is expected to ask all sides — including the US — to show more urgency in creating the conditions for a ceasefire.

The Prime Minister will today tell Mr Bush that work should begin on the international force that will act as a buffer between Israel and Lebanon. He believes that once this is done the time will be right to press Israel and Hezbollah into a ceasefire.

The tone of his words may be the first sign of tension between the two leaders over Lebanon, but diplomatic circles are increasingly worried that the Israeli onslaught will fail and that the ceasefire must come soon.

British sources have told The Times that the US flouted the rules by failing to notify the Civil Aviation Authority of the aircrafts’ contents in advance. Civilian flights carrying hazardous substances have to be notified to the authority.

Military flights carrying such substances have to inform the Ministry of Defence and, under some circumstances, the Foreign Office. The two flights last weekend were designated by the Pentagon as civilian cargo flights, and thus notifiable to the CAA and not the Ministry of Defence. However, the Government learnt about the cargo in this week, possibly through intelligence sources.

The sources who spoke to The Times assumed that the aircraft had been designated as civilian because they were available at the time and the bombs needed to be transported to Israel as soon as possible. Ironically, had the authorities been told — either the CAA or the Ministry — approval would have been given.


In their efforts to dampen the row, government departments insisted yesterday that the US would still be allowed to land such sensitive cargoes at British airports but that the Pentagon had been told in no uncertain terms that the rules must be followed.

A senior official said: “They have been playing fast and loose. We will haul them up. The procedures are there for a reason. There is an obligation on them to comply and they did not.”

An investigation by the CAA into the apparent breaches may conclude today.

The revelations prompted fresh disquiet among Labour MPs. David Hamilton, vice-chairman of the Scottish group of Labour MPs, said that if the reports of missiles passing through Prestwick were confirmed, it would be an outrage.

He called on Mr Blair to make clear to the White House that it should not use Britain as “a bargaining chip”. Michael Moore, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, has written to Mrs Beckett calling for an investigation.

Sources at Prestwick told The Times yesterday that the number of freighter aircraft such as 747s and civil Hercules C130s landing there had become “absolutely unreal”.

One aviation official said: “We get two or three a day. The US Government uses civil chartered aircraft a lot now and these aircraft can carry anything . . . military supplies or anything.”

Sources at the airport have indicated that the Prestwick stopovers for the bomb cargo flights to Israel happened last weekend but did not know precisely when. Neither did they know what type of aircraft carried the 5,000lb laser- guided bombs.

One report has suggested that Airbus A310s were used but local plane spotters’ lists for last weekend show no record of such an aircraft at Prestwick.

The controversy comes after revelations that Prestwick played frequent host to CIA flights transferring al-Qaeda suspects to secret prisons.

“Whoever is organising this, it’s way above the heads of people here,” an airport official said.



AIRPORT TRAFFIC

Sources at Prestwick airport report as many as three freight aircraft landing a day

Such flights usually require specific exemptions from hazardous material rules

Questions have been asked as to why the US would use a civil airport when they have military bases in Britain

Prestwick played host recently to CIA rendition flights transferring Al Qaeda suspects

Prestwick, 32 miles from Glasgow, was Scotland’s transatlantic flight hub but when US airlines switched to Glasgow Airport it went into decline

The airport is privately owned

Elvis Presley stopped at Prestwick briefly in 1960 en route to Germany; the only time he set foot on British soil

    Britain lets more US arms flights land in Scotland, Ts, 28.7.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2289241,00.html

Blair to tell Bush: we need a ceasefire

Drawn out Lebanon crisis will boost militants across Arab world, PM fears

Friday July 28, 2006
Guardian
Ewen MacAskill, Simon Tisdall and Michael White

Tony Blair will press George Bush today to support "as a matter of urgency" a ceasefire in Lebanon as part of a UN security council resolution next week, according to Downing Street sources.

At a White House meeting, the prime minister will express his concern that pro-western Arab governments are "getting squeezed" by the crisis and the longer it continues, the more squeezed they will be, giving militants a boost. The private view from No 10 is that the US is "prevaricating" over the resolution and allowing the conflict to run on too long.

But diplomatic sources in Washington suggest the US and Israel believe serious damage has been inflicted on Hizbullah, so the White House is ready to back a ceasefire resolution at the UN next week. Today Mr Bush and Mr Blair will discuss a version of the resolution that has been circulating in Washington and London.

The draft peace deal involves two phases. In the first, Israel and Lebanon would agree a ceasefire and a small multinational force would be deployed on the border, allowing Israeli troops to withdraw. Then a much larger force of between 10,000 and 20,000 troops would be assigned to implement UN security council resolution 1559, agreed two years ago, under which militias such as Hizbullah would be disarmed and the authority of the Lebanese government forces extended to the country's southern border.

European officials are sceptical about disarming Hizbullah. But they believe that, if other countries in the region can be persuaded to contribute to the buffer force, it would give them a vested interest in addressing Hizbullah's threat to Israel.

A British official said the two-phase idea was raised by Britain at Wednesday's international conference in Rome and "the US are almost certainly going to push something through next week".

France, which holds the presidency of the security council, has drafted its own resolution which it wants to push to a vote early next week. The French plan calls for an "immediate halt to the violence", "a handover of prisoners to a third party enjoying the trust of the two belligerents", UN shuttle diplomacy in pursuit of a "general settlement framework", and the deployment of an international force in support of the Lebanese army. Controversially, it says a buffer zone should straddle the Israel-Lebanon border.

It is unclear whether Mr Blair will urge Mr Bush to do something the administration has decided to do anyway. The prime minister is intent on demonstrating that he has influence in the White House and Britain has its own policy. Polls this week showed public disquiet over his closeness to Mr Bush and the failure to act more decisively to end the bloodshed.

The US and Britain have stood against most of the rest of the world in refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire. Mr Blair has not changed his position on that, but a Downing Street source said he would urge the US to move faster in backing the resolution. "Collectively we have to step up the urgency of the search for a ceasefire."

With an eye on the Arab world, Mr Blair wants to ensure that Hizbullah and other militant groups such as Hamas do not emerge stronger from the crisis. He will reiterate to Mr Bush that the key to resolving the violence is resolution of the Palestinian issue.

No 10 dismissed the row over US military flights using Prestwick airport, Scotland, to send weapons to Israel without telling Britain as an issue of process, not principle.

    Blair to tell Bush: we need a ceasefire, G, 28.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1832122,00.html

Stand up to US, voters tell Blair

63% say PM has tied Britain too close to White House

Leader: Standing back from America

Tuesday July 25, 2006
Guardian
Julian Glover and Ewen MacAskill

Britain should take a much more robust and independent approach to the United States, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today, which finds strong public opposition to Tony Blair's close working relationship with President Bush.

The wide-ranging survey of British attitudes to international affairs - the first since the conflict between Lebanon and Israel started- shows that a large majority of voters think Mr Blair has made the special relationship too special.

Just 30% think the prime minister has got the relationship about right, against 63% saying he has tied Britain too closely to the US.

Carried in the wake of the accidental broadcast of the prime minister's conversation with President Bush at the G8 summit, the poll finds opposition to this central element of the prime minister's foreign policy among supporters of all the main parties.

Even a majority of Labour supporters - traditionally more supportive of Mr Blair's foreign policy position - think he has misjudged the relationship, with 54% saying Britain is too close to the US. Conservatives - 68% - and Liberal Democrats - 83% - are even more critical.

And voters are strongly critical of the scale of Israel's military operations in Lebanon, with 61% believing the country has overreacted to the threats it faces.

As pressure grows for a change of strategy, the poll finds that only 22% of voters believe Israel has reacted proportionately to the kidnapping of soldiers and other attacks from militant groups in southern Lebanon. Israel has repeatedly sought to assure the world that its actions are a legitimate response to threats to its own territory, including missile attacks on the north of the country.

The finding follows more than a week in which Mr Blair has come under fire for echoing US caution about the practicality of an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East and for allying himself too closely to Israel.

At a press conference in London yesterday Mr Blair defended his position and expressed sympathy for the plight of the Lebanese. "What is occurring in Lebanon at the present time is a catastrophe. Anybody with any sense of humanity wants what is happening to stop and stop now," Mr Blair said. He added: "But if it is to stop, it must stop on both sides."

This did not amount to switch in policy but a change in emphasis, in part to answer critics who accuse him of being indifferent to the plight of the Lebanese. A British official said: "He wants to make it clear he has the same feelings as everyone else but the job of government is to find an answer. The proof of the pudding is if we are able to find a way through."

Unlike other international leaders, Mr has refused to describe the Israeli attacks on Lebanon as disproportionate. But the official said there was a difference between what Mr Blair said in public and what Mr Blair and other members of the government said to the Israelis in private.

Public unease about Israel's approach is reflected in public attitudes to the Iraq war, with support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein falling to a record low since military action began in March 2003.

Although a solid core of Labour supporters - 48% - still think the war was justified, overall only 36% of voters agree - a seven-point drop since the Guardian last asked the question in October 2004.

Older voters, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and people living in the south are particularly critical, suggesting the anti-war movement has a base of support well beyond student groups and the left.

Support for the war reached 63% in April 2003, in the wake of early military success. Now a narrow majority of voters - 51% - believe it was unjustified, the highest proportion for more than two years.

Amid fears that the armed forces are operating at the limit of their resources, voters also believe that British troops are doing more harm than good in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They are more concerned by the role of British forces in Iraq than Afghanistan, with 36% saying their presence is making the situation worse in Iraq against 29% who think this is true of Britain's more recent deployment in southern Afghanistan.

But both findings outweigh the proportion of voters who think British troops are improving the situation on the ground: just 19% of all those questioned think they are making progress in Iraq and 23% think this is the case in Afghanistan. Around a third of voters think that at best British forces are making no difference one way or the other in the two countries.

There is also minimal public appetite for fresh foreign policy commitments, such as a multinational force in Lebanon. An overwhelming proportion of voters think current deployments are already overstretching Britain's military resources: 69% agree; 19% do not.

Conservatives - 78% of whom believe the armed forces are overstretched - are especially concerned, despite David Cameron's support for an interventionist policy, symbolised by his visit to troops in Kandahar yesterday.

· ICM Research interviewed a random sample of 1,001 adults over 18 by telephone on July 21-23. Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

    Stand up to US, voters tell Blair, G, 25.7.2006, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1828225,00.html

Foreign affairs

Standing back from America

Poll: Stand up to US, voters tell Blair

Tuesday July 25, 2006
Guardian
Leader


Yesterday's shift in Middle East policymaking away from military escalation and towards diplomacy is welcome as far as it goes. It signals, but does not yet deliver, the winding down of the current hostilities. The change of direction, marked not just by the US secretary of state's overdue visit to Beirut and Jerusalem but also by Condoleezza Rice's own statement that a ceasefire is urgent, is doubly necessary. Both the human and the international consequences of Israeli bombing of Lebanon and Hizbullah missile attacks on Israel have begun to escalate out of hand. A ceasefire cannot now come soon enough for civilians on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border who have been subjected to unprovoked and devastating assaults over the past week. But that ceasefire, if and when it is achieved, will have little practical meaning unless it is also durable. The process must also address the grievances that provoked the recent conflicts and must put in place a wider, internationally-enforced security agreement that protects civilians in both nations against a recurrence of the violence.

But a ceasefire cannot come too soon for British foreign policy either. These have been damaging days for Britain's standing, not just abroad but at home too. The perception that our government has set British and European interests aside in order to stay in the slipstream of the US administration is in certain respects a caricature - as the robustly supportive attitude of Downing Street towards the strong statements of the foreign office minister Kim Howells indicates. But the caricature contains enough truth to further weaken British interests abroad and to further damage the government's already weakened standing at home.

It is indeed a global and an American tragedy of our era that the Bush administration is so rarely willing to engage wholeheartedly with international issues and crises, including in the Middle East, except on its own terms. The answer to that tragedy is certainly not to play to the international anti-American gallery as some would prefer. But Britain garners little respect and sustains enormous damage from pretending that the uniquely difficult character of the Bush administration somehow does not matter. Ministers do not deceive us by this pretence and they should not deceive themselves either. If they are not prepared to face up to the domestic and international consequences this time, it will be clear that they have learned nothing from the Iraq war.

The serious disjunction between British public opinion and the stances taken by the Labour government on these issues was a crucial reason why Labour's standing at home, so strong until the Iraq war, was so much weaker in the 2005 election and continues to be so weak now. The theme is powerfully illustrated once more in this morning's Guardian/ICM poll. Our survey depicts a nation that seeks to play a major role in the world but is uneasy about the way Tony Blair's government has gone about doing it. It depicts a nation which decisively - even among Labour's own voters - rejects the closeness of the Blair government to the Bush administration, and which thinks, as Mr Howells said at the weekend, that Israel reacted disproportionately to the challenges that it faces from Hizbullah and its anti-Israel backers. It is a nation in which a majority no longer believes the Iraq war was justified and in which there are serious umbilical reservations about the effectiveness of the continuing British military presence both there and in the very different situation in Afghanistan. It is a nation that accepts its international military roles, but also one that is also clear that its resources are being stretched too far. This is not a troops-out or a ban-the-bomb nation, though it contains many people who are. The British people, in short, have a realistic and commonsense view of our role in the world - and Mr Blair risks being out of step with it again.

    Standing back from America, G, 25.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1827945,00.html

British response

Howells ignores diplomatic niceties while Beckett denies rift with her minister

Monday July 24, 2006
Guardian
Rory McCarthy in Haifa, Ewen MacAskill and Michael White

The British Foreign Office minister Kim Howells refused to back down over his controversial comments about the Lebanon conflict when he arrived in Israel yesterday, repeating his calls for Israelis to show "proportionality and restraint".

Mr Howells ignored the diplomatic convention that he tone down his comments because of his presence in the host country, saying the Israelis "have got to think very hard about those children who are dying".

His strong comments about the impact of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon contrast with the uncritical support given to Israel and the US by Tony Blair and the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett.

The government is portraying Mr Howells as an emotional individual speaking his mind about what he has seen on the ground, rather than a government minister determining a new policy direction.

Mrs Beckett spoke by phone to Mr Howells yesterday morning. Afterwards a Foreign Office spokesman said: "They are absolutely at one." Downing Street too insisted there was no split.

Mr Howells spent Saturday in Beirut seeing bombed-out ruins. Talking of civilian deaths and the destruction of infrastructure, he said: "These have not been surgical strikes. And it's very, very difficult I think to understand the kind of military tactics that have been used."

Yesterday, in an interview in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, Mr Howells said the Israelis "know only too well it is not enough just to seek a military victory, they have got to win a wider political battle. That means they have got to think very hard about those children who are dying. It is not enough to say it is unfortunate collateral damage. Every person who has got a mobile phone, every person who can take a photograph of somebody being blown to bits, or a child with a limb missing, is a reporter now".

At some stage, he said, the Israelis had around 60 jets flying over the Mediterranean, readying for strikes in Lebanon. "I think it is something the whole world should worry a great deal about," he said.

Mrs Beckett, interviewed on BBC Radio Four yesterday, insisted there was no difference between the line espoused by Downing Street and herself, and Mr Howells. "I think basically what he is saying is that Israel has been saying all the way through that they are targeting Hizbullah. And there are bound to be problems because Hizbullah have entrenched themselves in relatively speaking ordinary neighbourhoods - not totally, but to a very large extent," Mrs Beckett said.

"What Kim is saying is that targeting Hizbullah is one thing and one understands why it is being done, but it is not working in the way that Israel had hoped and claimed that it was. And so that's why we have to continue to ... urge recognition of that danger on Israel."

Asked whether Israel had heeded calls for restraint, Mrs Beckett said she would not disclose private conversations with Israelis.

Foreign Office diplomats confirmed over the weekend there were significant differences between No 10 and the Foreign Office, and within the Foreign Office about how to respond to the conflict. No 10 also claimed that Mr Howells was merely calling for restraint all round and had not joined calls for an immediate ceasefire.

"If there was an immediate ceasefire now, who would be pleased and who would not? Hizbullah would be pleased because it still holds the two prisoners, Israel would not because it would have to stop attacking Hizbullah," one No 10 source explained.

    Howells ignores diplomatic niceties while Beckett denies rift with her minister, G, 24.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1827511,00.html

6pm

Britain criticises Israeli tactics

Saturday July 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Ned Temko in London, Conal Urquart in Tel Aviv and Peter Beaumont in Beirut

Britain has dramatically broken ranks with George Bush over the Lebanon crisis, publicly criticising Israel's military tactics and urging the Americans to 'understand' the price being paid by ordinary Lebanese civilians.

The remarks, made in Beirut today by the Foreign Office Minister, Kim Howells, were the first public criticism of the US voiced by Britain. The Observer can also reveal that Tony Blair urged restraint in a private telephone convseration with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, last week.

Sources close to the Prime Minister said that Olmert replied that Israel faced a dire security threat from the Hizbollah militia and was determined to do everything necessary to defeat it.

Britain's policy shift came as Israeli tanks and warplanes pounded targets across the border in south Lebanon today ahead of an immenently expected ground offensive to clear out nearby Hizbollah positions which have been firing dozens of rockets onto towns and cities inside Israel. Downing Street sources said Blair still believed Israel had every right to respond to the missile threat, and held the Shia militia responsible for provoking the cirisis by abducting two Israeli soldiers and shelling Israel.

But they said they had no quarrel with Howells's scathing denunciation of Israel's military tactics. Speaking to a BBC reporter before travelling on for talks in Israel, where he will also visit missile-hit areas of Haifa and meet his Israeli opposite-number, Howell said: 'The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people. These have not been surgical strikes. If they are chasing Hizbollah, then go for Hizbollah. You don't go for the entire Lebanese nation.'

He added: 'I very much hope that the Americans understand what's happening to Lebanon.' Only hours earlier, President Bush used his weekly radio address to place the blame for the crisis squarely on Hizbollah and their Syrian and Iranian backers. He said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is due to leave for the Middle East today, would 'make it clear that resolving the crisis demands confronting the terrorist group that launched the attacks and the nations that support it.'

Blair is scheduled to meet the President in Washington at the start of a US visit this Friday.

Senior diplomats said it was highly unlikely there would be a major diplomatic move to restrain Israel's planned south Lebanon incursion at least until then.

An advance force of tanks moved across the border yesterday, backed by a fierce barrage of airstrikes, including a half tonne bomb dropped on a Hizbollah outpost. Israeli forces focused much of their fire on the village of Ma roun al-Ras, on the crest of a hill less than a kilometre across the border. It was swathed in thick swirl of smoke.

Specially armour plated D-9 bulldozeers have also been brought in to level networks of foxholes and underground bunkers dug by Hizbollah.

Israel's army chief-of-staff Dan Halutz told reporters in Tel Aviv on Friday any military incursion would be limited in scope. 'We will fight terror wherever it is because if we do not fight it, it will fight us. If we don't reach it, it will reach us,' he said. 'We will also conduct limited ground operations as much as needed in order to harm the terror that harms us.'

Warnings to civilians

Israeli radio broadcast renewed warnings for civilians to flee the area by 7pm local time, but reports emerged of Lebanese casualties, including a seriously injured Lebanese woman who was taken to a hospital in the northern Israeli town of Safed.

An adviser to the Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz told The Observer: 'We are finally going to fight Hizbollah on the ground. The Israeli people are ready for this and the Sunni Muslim world also expect us to fight Shia fundamentalism and we are going to deliver.'

But he added: 'We have no intention of conquering and holding territory. We plan to clean a strip a mile from our border of Hizbollah bunkers and rocket-launching sites... We will go in and then we will go out.'

The Israeli air force dropped leaflets on southern Lebanon this week telling residents to leave their homes to avoid getting harmed in the fighting. Among the hundreds of thousands fleeing the fighting, there were few able-bodied men of military age.

Ali Suleiman, 50, from a village a few miles outside the coastal city of Tyre said his eldest son had joined Hizbollah.'When he dies, I will send another son and another and another. Tell Mr Blair, Muslims are not afraid - not of bombs or ships or hunger. We get our power from God.' Hizbollah has operated freely in the border region since Israel withdrew six years ago and are believed to have amassed an arsenal of some 12,000 rockets.

More than a week of airstrikes have done little to prevent Hizbollah from firing rockets at areas in northern Israel, including Haifa, the country's third-largest city. Today, more than 65 rockets fell - a dramatic increase from the previous 24 hours and at least 12 Israelis were injured. Britain's decision publicly to break ranks with the Americans over Israel's military tactics will cause deep concern in Jerusalem and a senior Israeli diplomat was at pains last night to play down any suggestion of a rift.

He said any feeling in London that Olmert's response to the Blair telephone call was a rebuff would be inaccurate. 'The tone was very positive. We agree on all the major aspects of this crisis and we are greatly appreciative of Britain's position.'

The Israeli Prime Minister, the source said, was merely reflecting an 'absolute determination to deal with the threat which we face from Hizbollah and to see that the UN resolutions requiring it to be disarmed are finally carried through.' Senior British sources also stressed their unwavering conviction that Hizbollah, and their Syrian and Iranian supporters, were responsible for igniting the crisis. They added that both the Syrian and Iranian ambassadors had been called into the Foreign Office last week to drive that message home.

    Britain criticises Israeli tactics, G, 22.7.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1826904,00.html

Downing St and Foreign Office at odds on Lebanon

Friday July 21, 2006
Guardian
Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill

A rift has opened up between Downing Street and the Foreign Office over Israel's continued bombing of Lebanon and the high civilian death toll.

Tony Blair is publicly highly supportive of Israel and has declined to call for an immediate ceasefire. But some in the Foreign Office are now privately urging greater restraint by Israel amid concern that the scale of the bombardment is counter-productive, disproportionate, and undermining the political stability of the Lebanese government.

Margaret Beckett, who only became foreign secretary three months ago, is trying to straddle the divide between Downing Street and her department. But she refused to bow to intense Labour backbench pressure yesterday in the Commons either to call for an unconditional ceasefire or condemn the Israeli action as disproportionate.

The Tories for the first time condemned the Israeli actions as disproportionate.

Mrs Beckett limited herself to calling for restraint on all sides, and pointing out it would be "a pity" if Israel lost the "window of opportunity in which it can highlight to the international community the scale and nature of the danger which Israel and its people face". She added that "the government has no wish or desire for the events in Lebanon to continue for a second longer than is necessary".

Her remarks were taken to imply that the Israeli action, in response to the arrest of two Israeli soldiers and the Hizbullah rocket attacks, was necessary.

By contrast, her junior minister, Kim Howells - due to travel to the region today - was more openly critical of the Israelis, as well as Hizbullah, reflecting the mood among many British diplomats and most Labour MPs.

Mr Howells revealed the Foreign Office "had repeatedly urged Israel to act proportionately, to conform with international law and to avoid the appalling civilian deaths and suffering we are witnessing on our television screens".

He added that Louise Arbour, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, had to be taken very seriously when she said this week that the attacks on both sides could be war crimes under international law.

No 10 has given no sign that it is shifting from its support of the US position of giving Israel time to reduce Hizbullah's military capacity.

In private, the Foreign Office, which has a reputation as being traditionally pro-Arabist, is sceptical about the Israeli strategy and its impact on the wider Middle East. It regards the Israeli bombardment as partly reflecting a need by the new Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, to establish his credibility as successor to the hawkish Ariel Sharon.

Reports from British representatives in Lebanon challenge whether Israel, after its initial attack, is having much impact on Hizbullah. A British official in London warned there was a danger that the civilian deaths risked alienating Arab governments that until now had refrained from condemning Israel's attacks.

Fighting flared on both sides of the border yesterday, amid signs that Israel was preparing a ground invasion. At least two Israeli soldiers and two Hizbullah fighters were killed. Later two Israeli helicopters collided six miles from the border, injuring four Israeli servicemen.

There has been an apparent policy vacuum at the Foreign Office since the conflict began last week. A Foreign Office source said: "It is difficult for the British to do anything. We cannot work out the direction of travel until we hear from the UN security council and know the intent of the US."

In the Commons, many Labour MPs were furious that the the shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, was prepared to be tougher in his warning to Israel than Mrs Beckett. "I think we can say that elements of the Israeli response are disproportionate, including attacks on Lebanese army units, the loss of civilian life and essential infrastructure and such enormous damage to the capacity of the Lebanese government, [which] does damage the Israeli cause in the long term," he told MPs.

The former international development secretary, Clare Short, described the British policy as "so unbalanced, morally wrong and counter-productive and disrespectful of international law".

The former Labour Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin asked Mrs Beckett if it was not "a tiny bit shameful that we can find nothing stronger than the word 'regret' to describe the slaughter and misery and mayhem that Israel has unleashed on a fragile country like Lebanon".

The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, said: "The prime minister's uncritical acceptance of the Bush administration is not only wrong but deeply damaging to Britain's international reputation."

    Downing St and Foreign Office at odds on Lebanon, G, 21.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1825645,00.html

Opinion - Mary Ann Sieghart

The shocking silence from No 10

Blair’s tacit support for Israel’s grossly disproportionate actions sends the wrong message

July 21, 2006
The Times 
Mary Ann Sieghart

IT IS A CASE of the Blair that didn’t bark. Why hasn’t the Prime Minister publicly condemned the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza? Most British — and many Israeli — citizens are horrified when they see the devastation wreaked by Israeli bombings. There were 80 such raids in the early hours of yesterday alone. By late afternoon, some 327 civilians had died in Lebanon, compared with 34 Israelis. Go figure, as they say.

If this is a proportionate response, I’m a satsuma. Even the most hardline supporters of Israel, who justifiably point to the country’s right to defend itself against attacks from Hezbollah, must by now have come to realise that the “overkill” will have the opposite of its desired effect. For every member of Hezbollah who dies, another ten will be recruited to its cause. The world will be full of sympathy for the benighted residents of Lebanon who had thought, at last, that their country had secured itself a stable, peaceful democratic future. Half a million of them have been forced from their homes because two Israeli soldiers were taken hostage. That hardly looks like justice.

Meanwhile, a forgotten war is taking place in Gaza, overshadowed by the bigger one in Lebanon. Since Israel began its hostilities there, three weeks ago, some 110 Palestinians have lost their lives and countless more have been injured, while just one Israeli has died. The civilian infrastructure has been trashed. And all this just as the Hamas Government and the Fatah party had at last agreed on a formula for peace negotiations. What chance of peace now?

Mr Blair, by his silence, seems to be endorsing the US line: allow Israel at least another week to take action against Hezbollah before any calls for a ceasefire are made. He would doubtless argue that, unless he is supportive of the Israelis publicly, he will have no traction with them privately. Yet there are two big problems with this approach.

First, the UK has little traction with Israel anyway. Mr Blair had a frank private conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, when he visited Britain last month. It doesn’t seem to have done much good.

Secondly, and more importantly, Mr Blair’s silence is sending a strong message to the world’s — and particularly Britain’s — Muslim community. By failing to condemn Israel’s overreaction, he is allying himself with those acts. What more powerful ammunition could there be for the radicalisers of Britain’s young Muslims? “Your Government doesn’t care about you and your fellow believers. You need to take action to defend them in this noble cause.”

It is a terrifying prospect. Mr Blair is endangering our nation’s internal security by his reluctance to move a millimetre from the US stance. Even if he is engaging in private diplomacy with Israel, it is not without serious costs to the rest of us. Long after he leaves government, we may be paying the price.

At yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, there was some disquiet about the official line. Some ministers are wondering whether it was wise to move Jack Straw from the Foreign Office at the reshuffle. For, had he stayed, the British response to the Middle East crisis might have been more nuanced.

Mr Blair and Mr Straw used to play a clever triangulating game. The Prime Minister would sound more pro-Israeli, the Foreign Secretary more pro-Arab. They used the same tactic with Iran. This positively suited the US sometimes, as it allowed Mr Straw to follow avenues that were not open to Condoleezza Rice.

Margaret Beckett, though, is not experienced enough either to make her voice heard internationally or to strike out on her own, as Mr Straw used to. It is a great lost opportunity. Instead, yesterday, she just parroted the US line, refusing to condemn Israel despite being urged to do so by members on all sides of the House.

The danger of the current situation is that Gaza and southern Lebanon risk becoming another Iraq, with their populations radicalised and their governments unable to restrain the terrorists even if they wanted to. The conflict could even bring together Hamas and Hezbollah, who currently have little in common apart from their opposition to Israel. Hamas is made up of Sunni Muslims; Hezbollah of Shias. But united, they would make a formidably dangerous grouping on Israel’s doorstep.

Mr Blair should be saying all this to Mr Olmert, on the record. Britain could be acting as Israel’s critical friend, representing not just the outside world’s fears for the region, but also the half of Israel’s population who believe that their country has been going too far.

He could point out that the “eye for an eye” doctrine of the Old Testament was not a vengeful prescription but was designed precisely to restrict vengeance to that which was proportionate. The verse did not ordain ten eyes for one eye, which is the ratio the Israelis are currently pursuing.

The War on Terror is too easy a pretext for Israel to hide behind. It does not give free licence for a state to bombard the innocent citizens of another in the hope that a few terrorists might be killed in the process. Imagine if we had bombed Dublin in the same way, with more than 300 deaths in a week and half a million people displaced. That would surely have been seen as a war crime.

Mr Blair has moved too swiftly from defending Israel’s right to exist to supporting Israel right or wrong. It is bad for the Middle East and it is dangerous for Britain. He ought to know better.

    The shocking silence from No 10, Ts, 21.7.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1071-2279230,00.html

Britain and US defy demand for immediate ceasefire

The Independent
Published: 21 July 2006
By Anne Penketh, Ben Russell, Colin Brown and Stephen Castle

Israeli warplanes continued their bombardment of Lebanon yesterday, defying a demand by Kofi Annan for an immediate end to fighting on the ninth day of a war that has led to the "collective punishment of the Lebanese people" .

Two countries, the US and Britain, defiantly refused to back the international clamour for an immediate ceasfire between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas. Their ambivalence about civilian deaths in Lebanon has given Israel a powerful signal that it can continue its attacks with impunity.

However, Israel's ground offensive against Hizbollah was blunted when four of its soldiers were reported killed in clashes in south Lebanon. Across the country clouds of smoke appeared as the aerial bombardment continued and the evacuation of foreign nationals, including Americans, was stepped up. Israel said it would allow humanitarian aid to flow into Lebanon as international outrage grew over civilian casualties which are now above 300.

Mr Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, used his emotive statement to the Security Council to reflect the deep-seated international unease about the human cost of Israel's response to the onslaught of rockets from Hizbollah guerrillas backed by Syria and Iran. "What is most urgently needed is an immediate cessation of hostilities," he said. However, he added that there were "serious obstacles to reaching a ceasefire, or even to diminishing the violence quickly."

An official close to the secretary general said he had taken soundings with "everyone" before making the statement. Mr Annan was also due to brief the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, last night on the findings of a UN mission which concluded there should be a temporary cessation of hostilities.

The statement was sharply criticised by Israel and the United States. In London, the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, told the Cabinet that those calling for a halt to hostilities, including the French government, were in effect demanding a one-sided ceasefire "with rockets still going into Israel".

Using similar language, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, said: "The first thing that must be addressed is cessation of terror before we even talk about cessation of hostilities."

John Bolton, the American ambassador, said: "As we've said repeatedly, what we seek is a long-term cessation of hostilities that's part of a comprehensive change in the region and part of a real foundation for peace, but still no one has explained how you conduct a ceasefire with a group of terrorists."

Britain and the US say they are not opposed to a ceasefire, but that Hizbollah must first stop firing missiles from south Lebanon into Israel and release two abducted soldiers. Countries such as Russia, which are calling for an immediate end to the fighting, have accused Israel of harbouring broader strategic goals than the simple return of the soldiers.

Although he accused Hizbollah guerrillas of holding "an entire nation hostage", the UN chief accused Israel of a disproportionate response. "While Hizbollah's actions are deplorable, and Israel has a right to defend itself, the excessive use of force is to be condemned," he told the Security Council. Israel must make "a far greater and more credible effort ... to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure".

Tony Blair spelt out the British position on Wednesday. "This would stop now if the soldiers who were kidnapped wrongly... were released," he said. "It would stop if the rockets stopped coming into Haifa, deliberately to kill innocent civilians. If those two things happened, let me promise... I would be the first out there saying: 'Israel should halt this operation'."

Britain, the US, Israel and many of the other 189 UN General Assembly members will state their positions today at a public meeting of the UN Security Council as the 15-member chamber tries to reach a consensus on how to end the conflict. But the positions of the five permanent members of the council appear increasingly to reflect those before the Iraq invasion - with the US and Britain on one side, and France, Russia and China on the other.

France is president of the Security Council this month and is therefore charged with trying to bridge the gap between the opposing sides.

The EU said yesterday that a ceasefire was essential before any peacekeeping mission can be deployed to southern Lebanon, and said the two sides were "not listening enough" to calls for an end to violence.

Matti Vanhanen, the Prime Minister of Finland, which holds the EU presidency, did not specify that he wants an immediate ceasefire - thereby avoiding a direct clash with Britain. However, Mr Vanhanen' allies said he privately supported the idea of an immediate cessation of hostilities.

Of the European countries, the UK has expended most diplomatic effort in trying to head off calls within the EU for an immediate end to the fighting. European diplomats believe that the US will only contemplate ceasefire calls when Ms Rice visits the region next week, giving Israel's offensive several more days.

Mr Vanhanen's comments went further than a carefully crafted declaration agreed by EU foreign ministers on Monday, in which the UK resisted calls for an immediate ceasefire. But the Foreign Office said it agreed with Mr Vanhanen's comments yesterday because he said only that an end to hostilities was a precondition of sending an international intervention force.

What was said

Kofi Annan Secretary
General of the United Nations

"What is most urgently needed is an immediate cessation of hostilities."

Matti Vanhanen
Prime Minister of Finland, which holds the EU Presidency

"All parties to the conflict must first commit to a ceasefire."

Dan Gillerman
Israel's Ambassador to the UN

"The first thing that must be addressed is cessation of terror before we even talk about cessation of hostilities."

John Bolton
The United States' Ambassador to the UN

"What we seek is a long-term cessation of hostilities... but still no one has explained how you conduct a ceasefire with a group of terrorists."

Tony Blair
Prime Minister

"If it is to stop, it has to stop by undoing how it started. And it started with the kidnap of Israeli soldiers and the bombardment of northern Israel. If we want this to stop, that has to stop."

    Britain and US defy demand for immediate ceasefire, I, 21.7.2006, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1188875.ece

Warship takes more Britons to Cyprus

July 21, 2006
The Times
By Our Foreign Staff

A ROYAL NAVY warship took about 1,300 people out of Lebanon yesterday as the exodus of foreigners gathered pace.

The assault ship HMS Bulwark carried out the biggest rescue mission of Britons so far. The Ministry of Defence said that some 2,800 people had been transported from Lebanon since the operation began.

Britain has two sovereign military bases on Cyprus which are receiving evacuees. The RAF had airlifted out small numbers of evacuees. On Wednesday more than 1,000 Britons were taken to Cyprus on the smaller destroyers HMS York and HMS Gloucester.

Last night the extremist cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed claimed that he had tried to board a British vessel but was turned away.

When he travelled to Lebanon last year he was excluded from returning by Charles Clarke, who was Home Secretary then, and was stripped of his leave to remain in Britain, his presence having been ruled to be “not conducive to the public good”.

An MoD spokesman cast doubt on Mr Bakri Mohammed’s claim, saying: “Our understanding is that’s not true.”

    Warship takes more Britons to Cyprus, Ts, 21.7.2006, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2279823,00.html

9.30am

British evacuees return from Lebanon

Thursday July 20, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Press Association

The first Britons evacuated from the devastation of war-torn Lebanon arrived back in the UK today.

The 80 evacuees, who landed at Gatwick Airport at around 1.30am, expressed relief to have escaped unharmed from the week-long Israeli bombardment.

They arrived on charter flight AMT6205 from Cyprus, where they had been ferried from the Lebanese capital Beirut on board the Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Gloucester.

Their escape, at the start of the biggest war zone evacuation since Dunkirk, came amid concerns of an escalation in the Middle East conflict, which has already claimed the lives of more than 200 Lebanese citizens.

There are up to 12,000 British nationals and a further 10,000 dual nationals living in Lebanon, with 5,000 expected to flee the country. The number of evacuees being rescued by the Royal Navy is expected to soar into the thousands today.

HMS Gloucester was due to return to the port of Limassol at 1am local time (11pm UK time) with 650 passengers, considerably more than the 180 it took to Cyprus yesterday morning.

Together with HMS York, which brought 330 evacuees from Beirut yesterday, they will sail back and forth between Beirut and Cyprus for as long as they are needed.

Four more Royal Navy ships, including the aircraft carrier, HMS Illustrious, and the commando assault ship, HMS Bulwark, will arrive off the Lebanese coast today as further evacuations begin from 9.30am local time.

Most of the evacuees who arrived at Gatwick this morning spoke of their joy at fleeing the conflict but expressed sadness and concern for those they left behind.

Among them were 32-year-old Elise Mazegi, from Brighton, East Sussex, and her five-month-old triplets, Isabella, Yasmin and Joey, and three-year-old son, Dany. She was living with her sister in a Beirut suburb when the Israeli air strikes started overnight on July 12.

She said: "We were up in the mountains when the bombings were taking place, so didn't experience anything like Beirut. I'm just relieved to be home. It has been very tiring. I'm looking forward to a reunion with my husband later today in Brighton.

"It was a really well organised evacuation, and everybody was really helpful."

Mary and Peter Salmon, from Hockley, Essex, hugged their 18-year-old son Charles with their 10-year-old daughter Caroline as he arrived with his girlfriend Rachel Curry, 19, and her 16-year-old brother, Christopher, who live in Canterbury, Kent.

Charles, Rachel and Christopher were on a three-week holiday in Beirut where Miss Curry's family work when the conflict erupted. Charles said: "The bombings seemed to be dying down towards the end of our stay, but we didn't know how long that would last. At one point, 30 bombs went off at night. I could hear my mum's voice wobble when I was on the phone to her that night."

Nadia Hamza, 24, from Willesden, north-west London, broke down in tears as she spoke of how she has not heard from her three young children who were on a month-long holiday with her ex-husband in Soor.

Ms Hamza said she last received a phone call from her ex-husband last Friday, but has since watched news reports terrified they have been caught up in the attacks.

This morning she turned up at Gatwick in the hope that her children, Ahmed, six, Mohammed, five, and four-year-old Dalia, were among the first wave of evacuees to return to the UK.

However, they were not. Ms Hamza said: "I haven't eaten or slept since last Friday, I'm going out of my mind.

"I have been glued to the television watching all these images and not knowing whether my children are alive or dead. Every time I try to phone my ex-husband, I get no answer. I heard about this flight and hoped that my children will be on there, but I just don't know. If they are not on board, I will keep coming back."

Ms Hamza said Mohammed suffers from numerous disabilities and needs regular medication.

The foreign office minister, Lord Triesman, will travel to Cyprus today to review the continuing evacuation of British citizens.

Lord Triesman said last night: "The evacuation is well under way. By the end of today we will have evacuated over 1,000 people from Beirut. Our priority continues to be to get those most in need out first, as safely as possible."

In Cyprus, he plans to meet some of those evacuated, as well as meeting some of those helping them, including Foreign Office staff, immigration officials, the Red Cross and members of the armed forces.

    British evacuees return from Lebanon, G, 20.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1824816,00.html

Echoes of Cold War: Russia Accuses Britain of Spying

January 23, 2006
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW, Jan. 23 - An espionage scandal redolent of the cold war unfolded here today after Russia accused four British diplomats of spying and linked some of their activities to financing of prominent private organizations, including the Eurasia Foundation and the Moscow Helsinki Group.

A grainy, black-and-white video - broadcast on state television on Sunday night and shown repeatedly again today - purported to show a British diplomat picking up a rock that was said to conceal a communications device used to download and transmit classified information through hand-held computers.

The rock, the size of a watermelon and able to transmit and receive data at distances of more than 60 feet, was seized near Moscow, prompting a search across the city for similar devices, Sergei N. Ignatchenko, the chief spokesman for Russia's intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, told Russian reporters, according to the Interfax news agency.

A second device was found, but "the British intelligence service managed to retrieve one of the gadgets," he said.

A Russian citizen has been arrested for complicity, but another spokesman, Nikolai N. Zakharov, declined to say when he had been taken into custody and whether he had been formally charged. Mr. Zakharov would say only that the spy ring had been discovered and broken up at the beginning of winter.

The fate of the British diplomats - identified as middle-ranking secretaries in the embassy - remained unclear. Mr. Ignatchenko said their potential expulsion would be determined "at the political level."

The scandal, one of the most serious in years, threatened to raise diplomatic tensions, even as Russia assumed the presidency of the G-8 group of industrialized nations, which includes Britain. Mr. Ignatchenko accused Britain of violating an agreement in 1994 to end espionage in Russia. "In fact," he said, "we have been deceived."

Prime Minister Tony Blair, answering questions at a news conference in London, declined to comment. "I'm afraid you are going to get the old stock-in-trade: 'We never comment on security matters' - except when we want to, obviously," Mr. Blair replied.

"I think the less said about that, the better," he added.

The nature of the espionage was shrouded in secrecy, but the link to private organizations came amid a politically charged campaign against charities and advocacy groups here, many of them financed by the United States and European countries to promote such things as democracy and independent media.

Earlier this month President Vladimir V. Putin signed into law new legal restrictions on such groups that critics have said could be used to exert new pressure on those critical of Russian policies.

But the relation between the espionage charges and the organizations appeared tangential.

Mr. Zakharov said in a telephone interview that one of the diplomats, identified as Marc Doe, a political secretary, approved grants distributed by the British government to Russian and international organizations, even as he was involved in covert activities.

"He gave money to them," Mr. Zakharov said, referring to the organizations. "That is all documented."

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Moscow declined to comment on the affair but cited a statement by the Foreign Office that said, "We are surprised and concerned by this allegation."

"We reject any allegations of any improper conduct in our dealings with Russian" private organizations, the statement went on. "All of our assistance is given openly and aims to support the development of a healthy civil society in Russia."

One of the groups supported by Britain and cited by officials was the Eurasia Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that provides an array of grants across the former Soviet Union.

Irina V. Akishina, director of the Moscow office, said in a telephone interview that the organization had received a grant worth about $105,000 in 2004 to promote independent newspapers in provincial Russian cities.

She expressed bewilderment at the accusations, saying the television report, which appeared on the state's Rossiya channel with the cooperation of the Federal Security Service, was the first she heard of any questions surrounding her organization.

She said the accusations reflected the government's growing hostility toward private organizations that operate independently of the Kremlin.

"We certainly do feel there is some danger," she said, referring to the new law on organizations like hers. "We do not understand at all why we were mentioned in this program. We are not involved in any illegal activities."

The Moscow Helsinki Group, also linked to the case, is one of the country's most prominent human-rights organizations and is often critical of the Kremlin.

Russia's intelligence chiefs have publicly warned about the threat of espionage from the West. The warnings have underscored a growing wariness in Russian intelligence and diplomatic circles about what is widely seen as foreign interference in domestic affairs, especially following American and European support for democratic movements in Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics.

"Reconnaissance is not only waning," Nikolai P. Patrushev, the director of the Federal Security Service, said in an interview in the official state newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, in November. "It is strengthening."

Last year counterintelligence agents had exposed 20 agents working for foreign governments and 65 foreigners working for secret services, he said in the interview. Earlier last year Mr. Patrushev singled out several non-governmental organizations, including the Peace Corps and the British charity Merlin, as fronts for foreign espionage.

"Under the cover of implementing humanitarian and educational programs in Russia regions, they lobby for the interests of certain countries and gather classified information on a wide range of issues," he said of representatives of the private organizations.

Mr. Patrushev's remarks, sharply criticized at the time by the American and British governments, nevertheless became a basis of the new law putting such organizations under greater scrutiny.

The latest scandal involved espionage of a more traditional sort, though with a high-tech twist. The fake rock was used as a dead drop, an agreed place for exchanging classified information or otherwise communicating with agents. Where exactly it was remained unclear, though the television report showed it on a sidewalk near what was identified as a park on the edge of Moscow.

The hidden communication device allowed a Russian agent to transmit information in bursts lasting no more than a second or two, the officials said. The British operatives could then download the information with their own hand-held computers, the officials said, declining to discuss the nature of the information that the Russian provided to the British agents, or its significance.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London for this article.

Echoes of Cold War: Russia Accuses Britain of Spying, NYT, 23.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/international/europe/23cnd-russia.html